A Curious New Day in a Curious New City

As the ice crunched under his feet, the first of its kind since 1964, as he would soon be told by the lettings agent of Cherry House, he wondered what it was that made some people change their address and others not. Was it dissatisfaction? Or curiosity? Perhaps both. To him it might have been dissatisfaction brought on by the fact that his curiosity had not yet been satisfied, not nearly. But curiosity comes in many forms and as his feet adjusted to a new way of walking, he realised that curiosity is also the refuge of the masochist.

He did not know it at the time, as the jet engine relaxed and he took his wife's hand in an attempt to comfort her, or to comfort himself, but for the next two weeks his curiosity would jump to life in a way it had not known for a very long time. This was Dublin, a city named before the Romans built the old world, but whose meaning would carry for him only novelty.

He had left behind a world of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness, of birth, of life, of death and of the kind of people one never forgets. But for all his place of birth had been to him, he had grown above all indifferent to it. It might have been the sense of rejection he had felt in not being what it wanted him to be. However, as he searched his thoughts, he knew that not to be true, for in truth he had never wanted his country's acceptance.

And so, as he took his first steps on the ice and was welcomed by Dublin's cold yet paradoxically warm embrace, he wondered whether he would find acceptance here, which stirred his curiosity even more.

He did not know what treasures Dublin would hold, but at once he knew something new.