a travelogue by simon leyland (best feel good books .TXT) 📕

post office that evening and collect the letter, which bore a handwritten return address in Collins Street`


Herbert Park Dublin 4

The area around the duck pond is particularly popular with men who prefer to take their constitutional around two O’clock in the morning. The grass at the base of the ground near the building site which was soon to be the extension to the hotel car park, was particularly wet on a certain night in September 2000, and shone a livid green in the cloudy autumnal light.

A lost item such as a boys Liverpool scarf would have stood out quite clearly, even at a distance.

Later that night, the year’s fiercest storm broke over the area, blackening the sky over Herbert Park, where several Beech and Oak trees were rent asunder by lightening, and the downpour soaked the ground to such an extent that all foot prints were washed back into the soil.


The Odeon Cinema Lower Baggot Street

This popular venue was constructed in the 1936 and featured an elegant marble interior design depicting the Ziegfeld Follies, very typical of cinemas around Dublin before the Second World War. During the box office slump of the seventies the auditorium was divided into two screens, and the foyer featured a stylish bar where live entertainment could be enjoyed by patrons between performances. Indeed there is some conjecture that it was here that a young Chris De Burgh was first unleashed into an unsuspecting world.

A typical bill of fare on yet another random date, say an early evening performance in early September 2000 would have featured a showing of the new Harry Potter film, and a typical audience would have included local schoolboys and a housewife from Ballsbridge filling in the angry, empty hours before her husbands return from work,


The Merrion Road Day-Care Centre

This day-care centre run by Dublin Social services is a second home to local elderly ladies, many of them widowed, alone and bewildered, who attend during weekdays and enjoy a chance to socialise with others of their own age. On Thursdays there is a sing-along with Miss Holmes, a local schoolteacher, at the piano, and a wide variety of other pursuits are available for the enjoyment of those attending.

There are a limited number of permanent residents who through bereavement and ill health have found themselves destitute and alone in their twilight years.

One such resident is a Mrs Dempsey, who came to the centre in 2002. This colourful character outlived her husband after nursing him through the course of a crippling wasting disease, for which doctors could find no cure, or indeed causeMrs Dempsey was a familiar sight who touched the hearts of everyone passing the Day Centre, to and from O`Reillys Grocery store in Preston Road

On most summer days she could be seen seated at the open window, framed by the dingy net curtains draped in an old Liverpool scarf and would tell anyone who cared to listen, her fanciful stories of infidelity, rage and retribution.
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Publication Date: 01-22-2009

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