Why festivals suck

As you all will have noticed over the last few weeks, summer is now well and truly upon us.
With spring and summer, a number of things return to the daily routine. It’s already light outside when you get up, it’s still light when you get back from work, temperatures rise, clothes are being exchanged for lighter versions, ice cream trucks emerge from hibernation and outside drinking becomes part of life again. 
Football seasons end, trophies are lifted and people plan their summer holidays.
 
For over a decade, from 1995 to 2006, I spent my entire holiday budget, and most of my allocated days off, on one thing: music festivals. Every year, from January on, me and my friends would spend long hours planning our summer getaways. Now mind you, back then, the internet was not as ubiquitous a presence in life as it is now. Things like Google and Wikipedia did not exist in the mid nineties, and even later on many festivals still did most of their advertising through magazines and other printed media, rather than websites.
We would carefully pick the festivals to go to in the summer (though, inevitably, we would always end up on more or less the same ones every year) and be giddy with anticipation from March onwards. Line up changes would be carefully scrutinized and instantly communicated when noticed (it was a badge of honor if you were first to break the news that Slayer would be playing at Dynamo Open Air), festival gear would be accumulated, transport would be booked, often for your entire group of friends, and then the countdown began.
50 Days to Dynamo Open Air! Just one month to go! Guys.. this time next week we’ll be at the festival raising a cold beer! 

In short, I spent pretty much my entire twenties booking, planning and going to festivals. While my friends who weren’t into music all that much spent their summers on Spanish Costas and Greek isles, we spent our time on muddy graslands in Germany and Belgium, listening to songs about war and death. It was one of the best periods of my life, and I remember it with great fondness.
I can’t really point out why I stopped doing it exactly. It was a combination of me moving to Ireland, finding other interests and the idea that I maybe wanted to do something else with my free time. Whatever the reason, my festival-going career ended and I decided to pursue other goals.

Because I had so many friends who were still going to festivals, I was kept up to date with what happened to a certain degree, but after staving off the initial empty feelings when I knew they were at a major festival while I was reading the paper in a Dublin pub, the idea slowly disappeared from my mind. What I did notice though, after a few years in Ireland, is that more and more people started to drop out. Some of them gave up altogether, like me, and most others seriously cut back on their summer schedule. This was for a number of reasons- children, mortgages, serious jobs with little or no time for frivolities, etc. etc. but one reason that I heard from most of them was clear: It wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. I wrote this off against progressing age, the absence of friends that always used to be there and the urge to see other things than mud and the same bands for the 25^th time, but there was always a feeling that there was something larger at stake here.

 The first time I realised that all was not well in festival land, was when I saw this video:

Honey!! Where's my shotgun?

What the fuck was happening there?

This is not what you would call ‘festival ready’. In fact, as a veteran of the scene, I would put clothing like this at the very bottom of the advice list. Shocked by this revelation, I set out to investigate and, as it turned out, the festival scene has been infected by people who have no business in attending festivals. They don’t give a shit about the music, they have no respect for the generally accepted rules of engagement on festivals, and the only reason they want to be there is because their colleagues or neighbours are there so that they can say that ‘they’ve been there’ too.
This increased attention from people who don’t care about festivals or the music has lead to the deterioration of the atmosphere of old and I have found why that is.
Basically, there are 3 main things that are wrong with festivals these days, and I will explain them to you right here.

0. The entry price.

Ha! Fooled you! The ever increasing entry prices are not a reason for the downward slide of festivals. They’re a consequence of the fact that we are now into a second generation of people who think that paying for music is the most ridiculous thing ever. 25 years ago, performing artists made a large chunk of their money from selling records. With the advent of the internet, this line of income went out the window. Apart from the real superstars, no musician makes any significant money from the actual music itself. The only way to make money as a musician these days is by selling merchandise and playing live shows. This in itself leads to a clogging up of concert venues further and further ahead, as tour bookers are trying to tie down venues as early as possible to ensure a continued string of concerts and income. So the next time you complain about the high prices of concert tickets, consider buying an actual record instead of streaming or downloading it. You only have yourself to blame, and the widespread use of the internet, which brings me, conveniently, to the first real reason that festivals suck these days.

1. The internet and mobile phones.

Perhaps the main attraction of festivals in the mid nineties was the fact that you effectively disappeared from the face of the earth for 4 days. You and your friends would gather on Thursday morning at a local train or bus station, go to the festival and would not be heard of again until mid afternoon on Monday. This was great. For 4 days, the only thing that mattered was the festival and having as much fun as possible. There was no interference from outside news, no politics, no football scores, nothing. For the entire weekend, all that mattered was the festival, the bands and the party. What happened on the outside was irrelevant. Early on, mobile phones weren’t even a thing. Nobody had them, simple as that. Even when I did get my first mobile phone in 1997, I never brought it to a festival. What was the use? Mind you, mobile phones back then didn’t have internet access, games, or apps with public transport info or pizza delivery services. The only thing you could do with them was call people (remember that, calling people on your phone?) and send text messages, so there was no use in bringing a mobile phone. Anyone that mattered was at the festival, and the only thing that could happen was that you could lose your phone.
It was bliss. For 4 days, we were in our own world that consisted of live music, beer and partying. The outside world didn’t matter. Those who were at the festival forgot about the rest of the world, and those who weren’t had no idea what was going on inside. If you weren’t at the festival, you weren’t in on it.

I had a ritual that I always followed upon returning from a festival. Unable to cope with the real world just yet, I would get home, get a huge Chinese take away and spend the rest of the day listening to music, watching cartoons and working my way through an endless pile of plastic containers full of noodles, grilled pork and chicken satay. The day after, I would slowly start resuming contact with the outside world.

How different things are these days. From the second people leave for a festival, you are treated to a neverending stream of photos, videos and updates from the festival ground. Every single band is streamed live right into your living room, and everybody is connected to the outside world at any given time. It sucks. The whole idea of being away from the world is gone. While people are at the festival, watching bands, they constantly get live updates on their phones about what is happening outside the festival, who has been elected or deposed and what the winning lottery numbers are. This takes all the fun out of the whole idea of going to a festival.
Apart from ruining the experience of being entirely closed off from the rest of the world, the advent of mobile internet has another unwanted effect:

2. The crowd has changed.

Back in the days, when I told colleagues or other people who weren’t into music that I was going to a big festival, they would always stare at me with a weary look in their eyes. Their questions would always give me the idea that they had a picture of a festival being a strange cult-like gathering, where people would perform dark rituals and run around half naked, dazed off their head on drugs. While this wasn’t entirely wrong, it was nowhere near accurate either, but the point was that the ‘regular’ people (for want of a better word) had the idea that us festival goers were all weirdos who had sold their soul to Satan and spent their free time jumping around in the mud, which suited us fine. These people wouldn’t dare go near a festival in their lives and they preferred to remain in the safe confines of their own back yard, with all conveniences at hand. The arrival of mobile internet has changed this. As soon as the regular people saw footage of festivals coming at them, first on message boards and then on Facebook and other social media, they started to take note. Yes, we were still a bunch of degenerate weirdos who drank more before lunch than they did in a year, but somehow this looked like... fun. After some hesitant initial enquiries about how dangerous it was, and how the sanitary conveniences were arranged, a shift started to become apparent in the attitude towards festivals. This was noticeable as early as the turn of the millennium. One of the most clear cut changes in crowd happened right before my eyes at the Lowlands festival in Holland. The first couple of years I went there, everybody hung out with everybody. Technoheads drank with skaters, punks smoked joints with dreadlocked hippies and metalheads had a beer with anyone who was interested. It was one great happy family. On the last 2 occasions I went there, the change was shocking. Musical subcultures clustered together in their own segregated corners of the camp sites, and if you were crazy enough to play punk in a techno zone, you were in for a reminder of where you were.
And this was even before the regular people started moving in. With no interest in any of the bands that were playing, these people cornered off large swats of camp site, where they would play regular chart music, observed rather christian bed times and would tell you that ‘some people enjoy their sleep’ if you happened to make noise after midnight. One night, at around midnight, me and a friend were walking across a camping field, singing songs and laughing, and someone shouted from a large family sized tent that we should shut up as it was late.
It was then that I knew the festival was lost. 

Why these people don’t go to a regular camp site, far away from noisy drunks like me and my friends, I never understood, but the urge to be able to say at the watercooler at work that they ‘were there’ must go some way to explaining it.
This situation has not improved over the years. As I said, I haven’t been following this as actively as I used to, but I regularly see photos on social media, posted by festival veterans who are disgusted by the behaviour of people who don’t appreciate the festival atmosphere and therefore try to turn it into an extended version of their local football club’s annual summer barbecue.
That is not how it works. Festivals are different. 

And that takes me to point 3 of my rant:

3. The new crowd expect comfort.

When you’re at a festival, different rules apply. You leave the conveniences of home behind to be part of a special occasion. You accept that you will be eating luke warm hamburgers or fallafel for the duration, and don’t have your own kitchen or the chef of your local pub to feed you. Instead of having a nice pint on your comfy seat in your regular pub, you sit on the grass drinking mediocre lager from a plastic cup. And yes, you’ll have to take a shit on a mobile toilet that has been used by 500 other people before you since the start of the day. That’s all part of the experience. When you get home, you will appreciate the comforts of home all the more and you’ll be a better person for it.
But no, this does not sit well with the 21^st century crowd. They are too good for this.
Look, I’m all for choice. I love it that I can choose from 15 different types of hummus at my local supermarket, in 3 different degrees of fattyness. I love that my local beerstore has 300 different types of beer for me to choose from, and ads new brands almost on a daily basis. And I love that the pub at work has 12 different hamburgers that I can choose from for lunch. On a festival, however, this isn’t necessarily and advantage. Festival bars work under high pressure and deal with enormous crowds, often concentrated at certain times (the time frame between the end of one band and the start of another). Having 25 different beers on tap would make it nearly impossible to deal with the crowds, nevermind the pricing system. The same thing goes for food. If your customers can choose between a hamburger, a cheeseburger and a hotdog, you can serve one every 15 seconds. If every customer gets to order a custom-made snack, and decide on whether they want pickles, tomato or mayonaise on their burger, this will take far too long and the queue will soon rise to dangerous length. Live with a relatively limited choice for a few days, it won’t kill you.

The same thing applies for other comforts you are used to at home. Showers are a daily part of most people’s routine and I’m glad that they are. I wouldn’t want to sit next to people who haven’t showered in 4 days in the office, but on a festival this doesn’t matter. You’re either walking around in a neverending mudslide or in a midsummer dustfest. Your hair is going to be sticky, your clothes caked with dirt and your boots will need 2 days of solid cleaning when you get home. Taking a shower is a waste of both your time and your money. Rinse your face and brush your teeth in the morning and you’ll be fine. You can also do without extensive make up supplies, hairdryers or curlers and razors.

NOT Necessary.

Sleeping at festivals is best done in cheap tents. The best model is the so called igloo tent. These things are lightweight, can be bought for about 40 bucks and, best of all, are so easy to assemble that you’ll have your fortress of drunkitude standing within 10 minutes, even if you have consumed a dozen beers before you commence the assembly process (I know this from years of experience)

Tents add to the atmosphere of being out and about together and feeling part of the community. Should you go to bed early and not pass out immediately, you will hear the rest of the festival partying on, just inches from your head, which is an excellent incentive to get up out of your sleeping bag and back into the party. Alternatively, you can do as a friend of mine did at Wacken Open Air, some time in the early years of the century, and set up shop at the 24/7 bar tent. We arrived at the festival, he went for one quick beer and then spent the next 4 days there, in an area that we had sort of adopted as our group’s central meeting point. He would occasionally fall asleep under a picknick table for an hour or so and then stir back into life for the next round of partying.

But again, this is not to the liking of the current crop. Apart from ‘Quiet Zones’ where you can camp in the knowledge that it will be quiet after, say, midnight, they have come up with annoying things like phone charging zones, lockers for your valuables, and, I am loath to use this word, something called Glamping. Glamping is tied first for most annoying new word for this decade, together with the Dutch term VrijMiBo. This ugly abbreviation for the words Vrijdag (Friday), Middag (Afternoon) and Borrel (Drinks) is used mainly by middle aged women who don’t get out much and consider it to be a wild night when they have had 3 small glasses of white wine. People who use this word should be avoided at all costs.
Glamping is pretty close though. A lazy contraction of glamour and camping, it is a typical sign of the state of festivals these days. Rather than roughing it for a couple of days like you’re supposed to, the new breed of festival wannabees has demanded (and gotten) pre-erected deluxe tents with electricity, mirrors, fridges and other conveniences that go entirely against the spirit of festivals. Other festivals offer campers or even bungalows with all the trimmings that you can think of. It is ridiculous.
As I indicated at the start of the story, this makes me sad. The spirit of festivals has been erroding for a long time now, and nearly all the things that made festivals such a unique thing, a mountain of happy memories to be cherished for life, have now gone by the wayside. 
I miss going to festivals, but I know I made the right decision when I decided to call it a day and hang up my tent.

Having said all this.. I will be attending a festival once again this weekend. It is different from the ones I used to go to, as this festival takes place at an open air club on the Adriatic coast. There will be no rain or mud, no half cooked hamburgers and, most significantly, no heavy metal. This festival is about funk and soul music and will be more dancing than headbanging, more surfing than crowd surfing and more cold craft beer than luke warm lager.
The reason I’m going there is that I was invited by my good friends at the Galway Bay Brewery to tag along. They are one of the beer suppliers at the festival and I am ofcourse more than happy to keep an eye on proceedings.

Oh yeah, I will be staying in a hotel apartment. Bite me. 

How I met your Friends, Part II

Hi everyone, 
Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the first part of my tabloid writing experiment.
Here is the second part of the story, in which we will see which show is the best- Friends or How I Met Your Mother.
So let's go quickly to the next category:


Most annoying character (Main cast)

Friends:

My first thought for this accolade was Phoebe. This may surprise some people, because Phoebe is the free-spirited hippie chick who doesn’t stick to convention and lives in her own world, without being obsessed with money or what people think of her. On top of that, she seems to be the only one in the cast who sticks to her principles.



But does she really? If you look at the details you will find that Phoebe is nowhere near as free spirited as it seems on the surface.
Phoebe always professes that money shouldn’t be the driving force in your life. She says she supports independent businesses over large, faceless, corporate chains, yet she buys an apartment’s worth of furniture at Pottery Barn, the most middle of the road furniture chain in the country. She gets angry with Rachel for even considering using a gift certificate for a massage salon that is part of a large chain, only for it to emerge that Phoebe is working there herself. She constantly states that she makes music for the love of it, but when the coffee house hires a second musician, and pays that one, she kicks up a storm about wanting to get paid too. Never mind that she is a terrible musician who writes horrible, infantile songs that make no sense.
She also constantly reminds the others that they should just be themselves and not pretend to be something they are not. Which is all fine, but when she goes to meet her boyfriend’s parents she dresses like a 60 year old librarian and puts on a fake British accent to impress her posh in-laws.
When dinner is served, she denies being a vegetarian and attempts to eat veal to impress them.
This doesn’t really matter all that much, because she’s not really a vegetarian anyway.

Apart from the Meet-the-parents episode, there are 3 other occasions when Phoebe eats meat: When she is pregnant with the triplets, she convinces Joey to give up eating meat in support and then promptly starts eating meat herself, claiming it is not her who eats it but the babies inside her. Monica once tricked her into eating ‘vegetarian foie gras’ which, she later admits, wasn’t vegetarian at all and, finally, Joey reveals that Phoebe was once “so angry she ate a cheeseburger”
So that is 4 occasions that we know of where she eats meat. Phoebe is a phoney and a pretend hippie with pretend principals she breaks like clockwork.
So for a long time it looked like Phoebe was a shoe-in or this accolade, but let’s just give her a break. She had a tough childhood with a father who ran off when she was 2 or 3, and a mother who comitted suicide, resulting in her being homeless at age 14. So maybe that’s why she is a bit off and doesn’t always think clear.

And anyway, I would have had to change my mind anyway after I had a closer look at Rachel Green’s character.




Rachel is, quite clearly, the most horrible person in the world. You may think that this is based on the first episode, when she runs off from her own wedding and leaves her husband at the altar, but that is actually the only time she acts like an adult and makes a decision for herself.
From the word go, she is hell bent on driving Ross to suicide. Early on in the show, Ross confesses that he had a major crush on her in high school, something Rachel knew about. Ross then gets a girlfriend, and is happy, which does not sit well at all with ms. Green. She then tells Ross she is in love with him too, which leads Ross to break up with his girlfriend and get together with Rachel. This is the start of 10 seasons of them being in an on again, off again relationship. It always follows the same pattern- they break up, then Ross starts dating again, which angers Rachel. She will then seek to get things going with Ross again, but as soon as they get together she starts pushing him away again. She first breaks up with Ross, and then blames him for having drunken sex with someone else later. When Ross gets married again, she goes to the wedding to tell Ross she loves him, 5 minutes before the wedding, which leads to Ross saying the wrong name at the altar and, ultimately, the end of this marriage.
On a trip to Vegas, Ross and Rachel actually get married to each other on a drunken night, but ofcourse this is not to Rachel’s liking either so she demands a divorce the next day. In the final episode of the series, they get back together again in the penultimate scene, but I’m willing to bet that as soon as the cameras shut off, she dumped him again. Rachel is an egotistic, manipulative bitch. She is lazy and shallow and it is no wonder she makes a career in the only field where looks are more important than talent: fashion. She is also to blame for the trend of fashion enthousiast bimbos wearing t-shirts of rockbands despite not knowing even one of the band’s songs. Rachel Green is a horrible person and if she were part of your group of friends you’d hate her guts and be part of the I Hate Rachel Green Club too,  regardless of how good looking she is.

How I met your mother-
This was, again, a difficult choice, mostly because I actually like all the main characters in the show. As I had to pick one of them, I first considered Lilly because, as I stated before, she is a manipulative and deceiving dealmaker. She also proclaims to be a free spirit who wants to explore the world but in reality is, in her own words, “a hick from Brooklyn who gets home sick when she is more than 10 subway stops from where she was born”. She moves to San Francisco for the summer to pursue her artistic dreams, thereby dumping Marshall in the process, but secretly comes back to New York after 2 weeks and hides out in her apartment in Queens that she never told anyone about.
But again, like with Friends, I’ll give the wannabe hippie a break.

The reason for this is that I think that Ted should get the medal here. The reason is not that I dislike his character as such. Ted is a sound guy and if you knew him in real life, he’d probably be one of your best friends. 
The reason I picked Ted here is that he has got his priorities wrong. He is young, single, has a succesful career (and therefore money) and lives in the most exciting city in the world.
Yet instead of living it up and partying like it’s 1999, he spends the entire decade of his twenties looking for The One. This is something he could easily have done in his thirties, and he could have lived life to the fullest in his twenties. As it is, he splits his time between trying to tie down girls who aren’t ready for commitment, and having his heart broken by half a dozen who are but somehow don’t see him as the one. He is left at the altar by that incredibly annoying blonde woman from Scrubs, sees what is then the love of his life move to Germany to take up a course in cake making and tries to get into a serious relationship with a psychopath who wastes her time getting behind causes that are destined to fail. (Including an almost succesful attempt to frustrate the one project that defines Ted’s career as an architect).
Ted is a nice guy with his heart in the right place but, as I said, he’s got his priorities wrong.



The verdict:

Friends: Rachel is a horrible person. -5 points

How I met your Mother: Ted is a nice guy, and his love for architecture saves him from too big an embarrasment here. Still- so many missed opportunities. -2 points.

And now for a fitting end to the story:

The Wrap up

All good things come to an end, and so did both these shows. Writing an end to a long running show can be quite tricky. Some shows got it just right. Cheers, after 11 seasons, ended with an episode in which all the main characters from the show return to the bar, and then go home one by one, leaving only Sam in an otherwise empty bar.  As he is about to go back into his office, someone knocks on the door, most likely looking for a beer, to which he speaks the immortal words “I’m sorry. We’re closed”.




BlackAdder had a similarly fitting finish. After 4 seasons, all set in a different period in history, the final scene in the final episode sees the cast of the show, set in the trenches of World War I for the final season, run towards the camera and into a hail of bullets from the Germans. Dramatic, but efficient.
Other shows were not as great at establishing a satisfying finish. Seinfeld, one of the funniest shows ever made, put the cast on a plane to Paris, and then had the plane go down over the Atlantic. Disaster is averted at the last second, only for the plane to land somewhere in rural Massasschussets, where they are charged with breaking some never-enforced law and they all end up in prison. The End.
My name is Earl didn’t so much have a finish as the show was discontinued after 4 of the planned 7 or 8 seasons because of administrative reasons, which also sucked. So let’s see how our shows did.

Friends: At the start of the 10^th and final season of Friends, there are several story lines that need to be brought to a conclusion. First, Monica and Chandler decide to adopt a child, as they are incapable of conceiving children themselves. They end up with a girl from Ohio who has gotten pregnant but is not in a position to raise a child. In the final episode, she gives birth but it turns out she was carrying twins. Ross breaks up with yet another girlfriend, Charlie, who gets back together with her Nobel price winning ex-boyfriend, which makes Ross realise that the only woman he really wants is Rachel. He decides to confess to Rachel that he has always loved her, but there is one problem. Rachel has just accepted a job in Paris and is leaving New York to go live in France. 

As Rachel departs for the airport, Ross decides he wants closure on the issue, whether it is positive or negative and goes after Rachel to the airport, but he and Phoebe travel to the wrong one. As New York has 3 airports, he assumed she would travel from JFK as that is where most flights to Europe depart from. They then head for the right airport (Newark) and find that Rachel hasn’t left yet, as there was a delay caused by Phoebe who had called Rachel and insisted there was a technical issue with the plane, which caused panic among the other passengers. Ross urges her to get back together but Rachel goes on the plane anyway and off to France. When Ross gets home he finds a message from Rachel on his answering machine, but it cuts off halfway through with Ross none the wiser on her final decision. Rachel then walks back in the door, showing that she decided to get off the plane and stay in New York to get back together with Ross. During the final season, Phoebe gets married to Mike, the first guy she ever had a serious relationship with, and Monica and Chandler buy a house in the suburbs where they are going to raise their kids. In the final scene of the final episode, all the friends get together in Monica and Chandler’s apartment one last time and they decide to go for a final cup of coffee in Central Perk before Monica and Chandler move to the suburbs.

How I met your Mother.
Okay, take a seat and get a drink, because this is going to take a while.

When it is revealed that Barney and Robin are getting married (this happens at the start of season 8) everything else is more or less geared towards that. In the final episode of season 8, we get to see the Mother from the title for the first time, the unbelievably cute Cristin Milioti, as she buys a trainticket to Farhampton, Long Island, where the wedding takes place.
(Farhampton, by the way, does not really exist. I had a fun 20 minutes of playing with Google maps in  establishing this. Southampton, Westhampton and East Hampton all do exist on Long Island in real life, as do Bridgehampton and Hampton Bay. It is an incredibly beautiful and absurdly expensive area at the very end of Long Island that is full of summer homes for people like Larry Page, John McEnroe and the Kennedy family)

The rest of season 8 goes back to the regular format, except for the final couple of episodes when everybody is getting ready for the wedding.

The whole of season 9, then, takes place in the weekend of the wedding. Every episode and major scene starts with a time on screen and a mention of how long it is until the wedding, starting at 56 hours and then gradually counting down to the big moment. Several story lines take place with every one of the major characters having some issues to resolve.

Marshall has travelled to his childhood home in St. Cloud, Minnesota to inform his mother of their decision to move to Rome for a year. This is where it starts to get weird. When he arrives at the airport to go back to New York, he is informed that the East coast is dealing with the ‘Storm of the Century’ and that all air travel to and from there has been suspended. While air travel cancellations because of severe weather are not unheard of, Marshall’s subsequent decision to rent a car and drive the 1200 or so miles from Minnesota to New York is strange to say the least.
First of all, he could easily have flown to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or even Louisville. All those places are comfortably inland, so will experience no major disruption from an East coast storm, and are at least half the distance closer to New York. Secondly, the show regularly switches between Marshall, en route back to New York, and Farhampton, where the rest of the gang are preparing for the wedding. The weather in Farhampton, apart from the occasional rainy spell, is beautiful. Just for the fun of it, look where Long Island is on the map, and especially the Hamptons. Any major storm coming in over the Atlantic will hit Long Island before anything else with a vigour that will make the walls tremble and cows fly across the land. But hey, Marshall decides to drive halfway around the country anyway and, because of the situation, he is forced to share a gas guzzling hummer with a mean lady who works for  an oil company and with whom he constantly fights. 

Back in Farhampton, the others mainly entertain themselves by drinking and Lily finds a list, made by Ted, entitled ‘Things to do before I leave New York’. When pushed on what this means, Ted is forced to admit that he can not live around his friends knowing that his best friend is married to the love of his life and that he needs a new start and is moving to Chicago the day after the wedding. Ted asks Lily to keep this a secret as he doesn’t want to take the attention away from the wedding.

Ted has also bought a bottle of 30 year old Glenn McKenna single malt whisky to share with Barney to celebrate his wedding and their friendship. This whisky becomes a running gag throughout the final season as they break no less than 3 bottles of it during the season, each time when there is a shocking revelation. Ted’s original bottle, it turns out, was broken by Robin and Lily during a sword fight back home and they replaced it with cheap Scotch mixed with chocolate syrup and hand sanitizer. This replacement bottle is broken when Barney tells Ted, who subsequently drops the bottle, that he saw him and Robin at the Central Park Caroussel when they were looking for a locket that Robin buried there many years ago. Lily steals a bottle of Glen McKenna from a local liquor store, joking that security was weak, but this one breaks when Barney drops it as he sees his mother kiss his half-brother’s father. Ted then goes to the same liquor store and steals another bottle. This one perishes when he drops it because one of the band members (the unbelievably annoying Darren) bumps in to him, which causes Ted to floor him with a punch. This in turn leads to The Mother buying him a drink, as a thank you for getting rid of her annoying band member. It turns out to be a Glenn McKenna 35 year old, which the inn was stocking all along, but the bar man never offered this as the guests only asked for the 30 year old vintage. 



As Marshall progresses towards New York and then Farhampton, Barney is behaving weird, as he constantly tries to come up with excuses for leaving the Farhampton Inn to go run some errands. Robin constantly tries to stop him from leaving, fearing he might run off. Eventually, Barney manages to sneak away and finds himself at a Laser Tag facility, where he is arrested for breaking security protocol. Robin is livid and goes over to bail him out. It is then revealed that Barney has put in a lot of effort to give Robin a rehearsel dinner she won’t forget. The laser tag facility is in reality an ice skating rink, and Barney has put together a Canada-themed party there because Robin was homesick. The party has ice skating, fire works and Canadian celebrities.

Throughout this phase, we get a number of flash forward scenes in which we see Ted and The Mother, whose name is Tracy, return to the Farhampton Inn a year later, then 2 years later and then somewhere in the distant future, indicating that Ted proposed to her at the lighthouse and that they had their wedding there too.

Marshall, who has by now missed the rehearsal dinner, drops off his rental car somewhere (why not hold on to it for the last part, you’ll be hit with a massive vehicle return fee anyway) and takes a bus to New York. Just before they get to New York, it turns out that the bus does not go to New York City, but to Buffalo, New York, on the Canadian border, some 500 miles away. Marshall pleads with the bus driver to let him off near New York City, but the driver says he can’t make unscheduled stops. Eventually, upon learning of his predicament, some of the elderly people on the bus fake heart attacks, forcing the driver to drive to the nearest hospital, which is in New York City. 

Marshall then takes a bus to Farhampton (why not the train, like everyone else?) but the bus breaks down 5 miles from the Inn. He then decides to walk the rest, and in the episode Marshall vs The Machines we follow his progress. Eventually, exhausted, he sits down by the side of the road and is picked up by Tracy in the band van. (Here’s another thing that doesn’t add up- Marshall is a fit, muscular, young man who works out regularly yet he can’t walk the 5 miles to the Inn.
I can walk 5 miles easily and I’m 30 pounds overweight, haven’t seen the inside of a gym in years and am a decade older than Marshall is on the show)

So Marshall gets to the Farhampton Inn eventually and immediately starts to push for having a big party, in order to avoid having a fight with Lily over him accepting a position as a judge in New York, thereby jeopardising Lily’s dream of moving to Italy.

The group drink deep into the night, which causes Barney to arrive at a state of drunkenness not seen before, a state they dub ‘truth drunk’ which means that Barney will honestly answer every question he is asked, something he has never done before. This leads to his friends finally, after 10 years of trying, finding out what Barney does for a living- he basically signs all legal documents for Goliath National Bank to absolve them from any responsibility. (Throughout the show, whenever someone asks Barney what it is he does, he says ‘Please..’ and laughs and changes the subject. It turns out that PLEASE stands for Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything. It also turns out that Barney is secretly working for the FBI who are building a case against the comically corrupt GNB).

The day of the wedding arrives with Barney being unconscious because of his drinking the day before, which leads to his father in law being none too pleased and his friends trying to get him up and running for the ceremony.
Robin and Barney get married, Ted meets his future wife Tracy and Lily announces that she is pregnant again. (It turns out she wasn’t drinking the entire weekend- every time she ordered a cocktail, it was really just Sprite).
There is then a lot of confusing back-and-forth between the past, the present and the future.
The next day, Marshall walks into McLaren’s, only to find Ted sitting there, having a beer. Ted confesses that he is not moving to Chicago after all because he met this girl at the wedding and he thinks she is the one. Perfect ending, right? Well, we’re not done yet.

We then jump three years into the future and find the gang being together again. After some catching up, Robin and Barney announce they are getting divorced, an action that they claim ‘is not a failed marriage, but rather a very succesful marriage that has concluded after 3 years’.

Further in the future still, we find out that Barney has accidentally gotten a girl pregnant and is now a dad.
We then switch back to Ted and Tracy’s wedding, and Ted tells his children an important lesson about perseverance and the beauty of true love, while on screen he kisses his bride, the love of his life. Perfect ending, right?

Ted then goes on, saying “and you know kids, I carried that lesson with me, on every moment in our lives. Even when she got sick..”

Hold it right there!  She got sick? What the hell?
The camera now switches to Ted at the side of Tracy’s hospital bed, where she is hooked up to a number of tubes, looking, in fact, rather sick. She is pale and has dull eyes and looks very skinny.
It is never disclosed what disease she died of, but if you look around How I Met Your Mother fan sites, most people guess it is cancer.



Ted recounts the story of how they first met, on the train platform in Farhamptom (and how Tracy forgot her yellow umbrella in a club on St. Patrick’s Day, where Ted took it the next morning while looking for his phone, and then left it at his girlfriend’s, who just happened to be Tracy’s roommate at the time) and then a train obscures the view of the platform. They take the train back to New York together (a good 2 hours from where I estimate Farhampton to be) cementing the foundation for their relationship. The camera then switches to Ted, now with grey hair, sitting in the house he bought years earlier to raise his family.

“And that, kids, is how I met your mother.”

Now. That really is the perfect ending if ever I saw one.
The end.

Wait, why is there still 4 minutes on the clock?
It turns out that, after all, the perfect ending isn’t the end.
His children, apparently somehow not satisfied with the end, or even the fact that the story is finally over, something they have been waiting for for 9 years, (in the very first scene of the very first episode, one of them asks “Is this going to take long?”) start pestering him about the fact that their mother hardly features in the story (which is true) and that he still totally has the hots for Robin.
They then convince him to get back with ‘Aunt’ Robin, which he ofcourse does. Ted heads back to New York City to declare his love for Robin once again outside her apartment, with another blue French horn and, judging from her expression, this time Robin returns the sentiment.

The end.

Hold on. This is just not right.
First, it just doesn’t sit right with the viewers. They have spent 9 years watching a show called How I Met Your Mother, but the Mother from the title only appears for about 3 seconds before the start of  the final season, and even in the final season she has only about 40 minutes of screen time, most of that in flash backs and flash forwards. Then, to add insult to injury, she is killed off in added time without explanation. I think the only cinematographic ending that could have pissed me off more is if I had found at the end of Kill Bill that Bill was still alive.
I appreciate the synchronicity of having Ted return in the pouring rain with his blue French horn, just as he did in the very first episode, but I don’t think anyone was either expecting or hoping for this ending.

Then secondly, it is just not right for his children. After doing some calculating, people have worked out that Penny was born in 2015 and Luke in 2017 (accidentally the year I write this).
It is revealed that Ted tells his story in 2030 and that Tracy has died 6 years previously. They lost their mother at a very early age: 9 and 7 respectively- a traumatic happening in a young life for sure. Yet still their dad, when telling how he met their mother, reduces mom to a sideline character that is invisible for 90% of the running time of the story. Moreover, he spends most of the story regaling about his love for Robin and how his relationship with her and their subsequent break up has defined his life. Sure, his children are enthousiastic about it, be you can’t tell me that they’re happy with their dad babbling on and on about wanting to bang a family friend while reducing their mother to an also-ran, the number two in a one horse race he was only interested in once he realised that he was never going to get Robin. (Remember- they meet on the day Robin gets married to Barney)

Yes, I am a big fan of unexpected turns in stories, but this just doesn’t add up.

The verdict:

Friends: Predictable, everything ends up as expected- Chandler and Monica get their babies and move to the suburbs, Phoebe gets married to Mike, Joey is a succesful tv star once again and Ross and Rachel get back together. Everybody happy, cue the credits. 3 Points.

How I met your mother: If they had cut out the last 4 minutes (everything after Ted says ‘And that, kids, is how I met your mother), I would have been perfectly happy. I would even have forgiven them the nonsensical killing of Tracy. But this just doesn’t sit right. It’s just wrong. -4 points.

And now the moment we have all been waiting for: The Final Scores!

	Friends	How I  Met Your Mother
The Setting	3	5
The Apartment	4	3
Funniest character (Main cast)	3	5
Funniest character (Supporting cast)	3	2
Hottest girl	2	3
Most annoying character	-5	-2
The Wrap up	3	-4
Final score	13	12

Well.. would you believe that. Friends has won by a single point. 

How I met your Friends

One of the things that has always filled me with wonder is why so many people are obsessed with celebrities. I love movies and tv, but I really don’t care what the actors do when they’re off work. What amazes me further is that there are so many journalists and writers out there, some of them actually talented, who decide to spend their careers reporting on what is going on with movie stars, fashion models and the sad folk that populate reality tv shows.

In order to see what drives these writers, I decided to have a go at it myself. I know next to nothing about celebrities, something that often messes up my score when I take part in a pub quiz, but I do like comedy, so I figured I could write a celebrity story based on 2 tv shows that I can actually relate to.

I first got the idea for this story about two and a half years ago, when it had been 20 years ago since the first episode of Friends aired. This means that, by now, it has been 13 years ago since the last episode aired, which does not occur to a lot of people because it is still on tv every day.
Soon after Friends ended, its prime time spot was taken by a new comedy called How I met your mother. The 2 shows are often compared to each other and are, to be honest, quite similar.

Friends is a sitcom that follows a group of twenty-something New Yorkers while they go about their lives, loves and careers.

How I met your mother, on the other hand, is a sitcom that follows a group of twenty-something New Yorkers while they go about their lives, loves and careers. 

You can see where the comparison comes from. What further fuels the debate is the fact that How I met your mother started the season after Friends ended. People often ask me which of the two is my favorite and, I must say, I find it difficult to choose. They are similar and both have their strengths and weaknesses. They both have their own identity and I followed both devotedly for about a decade.

How could I choose between the two?

On top of the 20^th anniversary of Friends, How I met your mother ended only a couple of months after I got the idea for this story, and I have recently watched all 9 seasons of How I met your mother again (twice) which heightened the desire to settle this matter once and for all.

In order to solve the dilemma, I decided to use an age old technique. A method that is used by those purveyors of truth, that bastion of objective journalism, the pinnacle of quality: Italian tabloid newspapers.

This is how it works: they start an article about a subject that needs a decision between 2 possibilities. This is often a football match, or 2 blockbuster movies coming out around the same time or something equally trifling, but they also use this technique to predict the outcome of elections, the awarding of government tenders or the result of armed conflicts. They then come up with a number of totally random categories and give both sides points in each category, and at the end they add up all the points et voila: here is the certain outcome of any problem you care to  come up with.

So before we finally solve this, let me set the scene for the audience. I am sure most of you will have seen, or at the very least heard of, How I met your mother and I’m positive there is no one left in the world who hasn’t seen at least a couple of episodes of Friends, but for those of you who have spent the last 25 years in the Line Islands, here’s an outline of both shows:

 

Friends ran from 1994-2004 and is set in the West Village, New York City. The show follows the lives of six friends: Monica, a control freak with hosophobia, who lives in her grandmother’s old appartment. She initially lives there with Rachel, an old highschool friend who, in the very first episode, walks back into her life in a wedding dress after she ran out of her own wedding. Monica’s brother Ross, a nerdy paleontologist, lives in the building behind hers. He has just found out that his wife is a lesbian, and pregnant with their first child. Ross being unlucky in love is a continuing theme throughout the show’s 10 seasons. 
Ross’s old college roommate Chandler and his friend Joey live across the hall from Monica (‘Across the hall’ was, accidentally, the original working title for the show. It was changed to ‘Friends’ after test-viewings showed that audiences liked that name better). Chandler is awkward around women, but very funny. He comes from a broken home and therefore hates public holidays. His mother writes erotic literature and divorced his father when she caught him having sex with the pool boy. Dad now works as a dancer in an all male gay burlesque show in Las Vegas. Joey is an Italian-American guy and also the only real New Yorker in the group. He is a womanizer who lives on pizza and meatball sandwiches, but he is a really nice guy who is always there for his friends.
The cast is completed by Phoebe, a free-spirited hippie chick, who is the odd one out in the group. She’s the only one that doesn’t live in the same neighbourhood, makes a living as a masseuse and by taking odd jobs here and there, she is a vegetarian and a musician and sometimes plays live in the group’s coffee house hangout.

How I met your mother is centered around main character Ted Mosby. He is an architect who is obsessed with one thing: finding the love of his life. He arranges his life around his search for his soulmate and this is the main theme of the show. The show is set up as a flashback from the year 2030, when Ted tells his now teenage children how he met their mother all those years ago.
Ted shares a Midtown appartment with his former college roommate and best friend Marshall, a friendly giant of a guy who is originally from rural Minnesota. Marshall sometimes finds it hard to adjust to life in the big city and make it as a big shot lawyer. Marshall’s girlfriend Lily practically lives there too, but it is revealed somewhere along the line that she kept her own appartment in Queens without Marshall knowing about it. (How she can afford to keep a New York City appartment, besides the one she already lives in, on a kindergarten teacher’s salary is a mystery to me, but let’s not dwell on that too much). The three of them spend their time hanging out in a bar on the ground floor of their appartment building with their friends Barney and Robin. Barney is an over the top party animal and womanizer whose sole purpose in life is to get drunk and hook up with girls. Robin is a tv news presenter who is originally from Canada but has come to New York to build her career as a journalist.

So now that really everybody knows what both shows are about, let’s get to the fun part: the scoring.

The setting.

Friends: Central Perk, a coffee house in the Village.
 

How I met your mother: McLaren’s, an Irish pub somewhere in Midtown Manhattan

Verdict: Wooh, first blood to How I met your mother!
Though the setting of a coffee house was considered hip and edgy in the early 90s, you can’t beat a New York Irish pub.
Unfeasible as it might sound now, with every street in the world having at least 1 coffee house on it, the idea of a group of twenty-somethings spending their days in a coffee house was quite revolutionary in 1994. The creators of Friends came up with this idea to give the show a different setting but were initially urged by the network to change the backdrop to a diner or bar. The creators didn’t budge though, because they thought switching the setting for the show would make it resemble existing shows too much as Seinfeld, the number one show at the time, largely took place in a diner and a bar setting would remind people of Cheers! too much (It may seem ancient history to younger readers, but when Friends first started, Cheers! had only ended about a year earlier). It is later revealed, in one of those flashback episodes that increase in number as a show progresses through the seasons, that Central Perk was in fact originally a bar but that the owner thought it a good idea to do something else with the space.
Though Central Perk is a strong focal point in the show, McLaren’s gets the point in this category as most of the show’s important moments take place in the bar, whereas in Friends most memorable moments happen in Monica’s apartment.

The Verdict:
Friends:  3 points

How I met your mother: 5 points.

Speaking of apartments..

The apartment

Friends: When you say ‘sitcom apartment’ to someone these days, for most people, the first thing that comes to mind is a vision of Monica’s apartment in Friends. It is the quintessential sitcom apartment of the past 25 years. Apart from the first 2 minutes or so, the apartment is the focal point of the show, literally from the word go until the final second of the final episode. Nearly every major event in the show’s 10 seasons takes place in the apartment, and it is the constant factor that keeps the show together. Monica ofcourse lives there for the entire duration of the show, 6 years with Rachel and 4 with Chandler, but we learn throughout the show’s run that every mmber of the cast has at some point lived there. Phoebe was Monica’s roommate at some undetermined point before the first episode (though Phoebe mentions in one episode that it was in 1992), Joey and Chandler lived there together for 2 weeks when they won it in a bet and Ross, we learn in the final episode, lived there with his grandma one summer when he was in highschool and took a ballet course during school holidays.

How I met your mother: While the apartment that takes centre stage in the show has some memorable moments (Who can forget the sword fight, or the night that Ted and Barney turn the apartment into a bar?) it doesn’t represent the same consistency as Monica’s apartment in Friends. Ted and Marshall move in to the apartment after college, then Lily moves in. Marshall and Lilly move in to their own apartment, which turns out to be an architectural nightmare with slating floors. Robin moves in with Ted. And then moves out again, realizing that their past together makes it impossible to live together as friends. At this point Ted buys a house in the suburbs, as a fixer-upper. Then Marshall and Lily move to Long Island when Lily’s grandparents give them their house (yes, GIVE them their house) but they eventually get bored and want to move back to the city. Ted then moves out of the apartment for good, realizing that he will never be able to get over Robin if he stays in the apartment where he spent his entire time as Robin’s friend and boyfriend, and leaves the lease in Marshall and Lily’s name.

It’s all a bit messy and that ultimately costs How I Met Your Mother the points here.

The Verdict:

Friends: 4 points

How I met your mother: 3 points

Funniest Character (Main cast)

Friends: What made Friends so instantaniously popular (and makes that it is still such a great show after all those years) is the fact that it was the first sitcom that had an ensemble cast. All comedies that had come before had one central figure the focus was on. Ofcourse, Cheers! wouldn’t be the same without Norm and Cliff and all the others, but it is essentially the Sam Malone Show. Seinfeld, obviously, existed around Jerry Seinfeld and even though Married With Children was about the Bundy family, Al Bundy was the star of the show and the rest of the cast was just there for him to bounce off. 
Friends changed all this. No matter who your favorite character in Friends is, you simply can not make a case that that character was the focal point of the show. All characters had times when they were the focus of an episode, like Joey when he first moved out of the apartment he shared with Chandler, or Rachel and Ross in one of the approximately 327 episodes where they either break up or get together, but when you look at the entire show, there is no single character that is more important than the others. 

So depending on your personal preferences, you could nominate any character for being the funniest in their own way- Joey for being so dimwitted, Monica for being such a control freak or Ross for being such an enormous dork without he himself realizing it, but in the end I have chosen Chandler here. Chandler is the only character that is predominantly funny because he himself is funny. Monica is funny because she is obsessed with neatness, not because she is funny. Joey is funny because of his shallow view of the world, which revolves around women and food. Ross is funny because people constantly make fun of him and his dinosaurs, while Ross himself still thinks everybody finds the subject just as interesting as he does.
Chandler, however, is just a funny guy who constantly pokes jokes at his colleagues, his friends and random strangers. He is the comic centre of the show and therefore wins this category.

How I met your Mother: Though you could still consider How I met your Mother as an ensemble cast, the set up of the show focuses it on Ted. Though all characters have their issues to deal with, in the end it always comes back to Ted and his neverending search for the love if his life. There is just one problem with: the guy can be a bit of a bore at times. He has his moments, certainly, but he mostly seems to live with one foot on the brake, afraid he might miss the love of his life. Marshall is much better when it comes to comedy genius and Robin has her funny moments too, though these are mostly based around her Canadian devil-may-care attitude to life. Lily is rarely funny and functions more as a sort of spin doctor who is too busy trying to interfere with other people’s lives behind the scenes than as a comic relief.

But there can be only one winner here and that is Barney Stinson. I hate womanizers in real life but Barney Stinson is so unbelievably over the top that you just can’t do anything but laugh. Because of his high-salary/low-intensity job as an executive at some shadowy banking conglomerate (more on that later) he spends every day of his life partying and coming up with insane schemes for more parties and getting more women into his bed.

Barney has writen a book called The Bro Code, which explains in the most minute details how one should treat their bros and how to behave in every situation possible. He also wrote a book called The Play Book, which sets out every move and detail of all his mental schemes to get women to sleep with him, and regularly comes up with futile but entertaining festivities such as Bangtober fest, The Perfect Week and impromptu wild nights out that make no sense (my favorite of those being “The night we partied with The Mole People”). His apartment is full of high tech gadgets that help him get rid of women after he has had sex with them, like a moving bed that disappears into a wall, a non-functioning kitchen (no need for awkward breakfast talk) and a hologram projector that allows him to make appearances as a ghost or enigma if need be. 

On top of all this, he constantly comes up with outlandish, unprobable stories (which he always announces by lifting his index finger and saying ‘True story!’) that are steeped in myth and filled with vague characters that are somehow related to him. His favorite amongst these is one Barnabas Stinson, allegedly one of the founding fathers and a personal friend of George Washington, whom he regularly summons to explain why he and Ted should go somewhere or give in to something. 
Barney Stinson is not only  by far the funniest character in How I met your Mother, I would even say he is one of the funniest characters in sitcom history, rivalled only by Norm from Cheers! and Al Bundy from Married with Children.




The Verdict

Chandler Bing is a funny guy, but can’t live up to the comic brilliance of Barney Stinson

Friends: 3 points
How I met your Mother: 5 points

Funniest Character (Supporting cast)

Friends: At first I considered Fun Bobby for this accolade, because he is a funny guy, but then I remembered that he was only in 2 episodes at the very start of the show’s run and after that is never seen again. I then considered Jack Geller because he is funny and entertainingly awkward without exactly venturing into  Jim’s Dad territory, but eventually I decided that Gunther should take the cake. He is mostly in the background, but a running theme is that he is hoplessly in love with Rachel throughout the entire run of the show but Rachel never realises this, despite him doing anything to please her, like buying her horrible hairless cat and all of Ross’s furniture when Emily insists he gets rid of everything Rachel ever touched.  Gunther never really has any major influence on the plot of an episode, apart from the time he ‘accidentally’ rats out Ross to Rachel for cheating on her. It also turns out that he speaks fluent Dutch

How I met your Mother: Again, there were several candidates here. Ted’s father and his microbrewery (played by the same guy who played the boringest sitcom dad ever; Steven Keaton in Family Ties), Barney’s real father Jerry and several others, but none of them have any real impact on the show and only occur in a couple of episodes. The winner here must be James Stinson, Barney’s gay black half brother. He is essentially the same as Barney, always looking for hook ups and trying to get people to sleep with him.



The verdict:
As they are recurring characters, neither has really put their stamp on their respective show, but because Gunther is responsible for escalating the ‘We were on a break’ joke, one of the major themes throughout the show’s history, he wins this category.

Friends: 3 points

How I met your mother: 2 points.

Hottest girl

Friends:

You could make a case for each of the 3 main female characters, but it was an easy choice in the end. Phoebe aged about 20 years in the show’s 10 seasons, unlike Rachel, who looks like she hasn’t aged a day in that same period. Even today, at the age of 48, you wouldn’t give Jennifer Aniston a day over 35. But in the end, my vote goes to Monica. Even though her character is bossy and neurotic, she looks great and I’ve had a soft spot for her ever since she was in that Bruce Springsteen video in 1985.

And really.. who can blame me, when she looks like this at age 50?

How I met your Mother:

This was a lot harder to decide, despite having only 2 characters to choose from.
I’ve been a big fan of Michelle Hannigan ever since I saw the first Amerian Pie movie. She’s cute and funny and of Irish descent. She doesn’t have the greatest role in the show- Lilly Aldrin is a deceiving manipulator with a hidden agenda, but is still great fun to watch. Feel free to enter your Band camp jokes here.
I had never heard of Coby Smulders before I saw the first episode of How I met your Mother, but I liked Robin Scherbatzky from the first scene she appeared in. She’s beautiful, not afraid of anyone and of Dutch descent. She is essentially the focal point of the show, despite not being the mother from the title, and the character that both keeps the rest of the group together and pushes them apart.

Difficult choice, but I have to go with Robin.

The verdict:
This was difficult to decide, but Robin Scherbatzky’s down to earth character beats Monica’s neurotic mannerism. But only just.

Friends: 2 points

How I met your mother: 3 points.



So how will it finish? Check back in tomorrow to read the end of the story.

10 years in Ireland.

Ten years. A whole decade.
When I moved to Ireland on January 4, 2007, the intention was to stay here for 6 months.
The plan got derailed somewhere along the way.

I have been thinking a lot lately about why this happened. Why didn't I go home as planned, in July 2007, to celebrate my birthday and get on with life? What made me stay? Why am I still here ten years later?
Rather than write up a long drawn out story about all that happened in my time here in Dublin, I decided to explain why Dublin is such a great city and why feel so at home here.

Why Dublin? Is a question I get asked a lot. What made you move to Dublin, with its shifty weather, room-for-improvement public transport system and mid table social care system.
Why not Barcelona or London or Edinburgh?

I always had a thing for Ireland. When I was a little kid, the main things on the news were the war in Iraq and the Troubles in the North of Ireland. I guess that made sort of an impact. I always had a fascination for the country. I’ve always read about it and have always been interested in anything related to Ireland. I once featured in the magazine of the housing corporation in Rotterdam, in their series about people with strange hobbies. After a guy who breeded pigeons, a woman who collected tea spoons and a bunch of other random people with oddball ways of filling their spare time, it was my turn to explain why much of my life revolved around that little island in the Atlantic Ocean.

                     Feature photo


When I eventually went to Ireland myself for the first time, in March 2004, it was an experience that changed my life. I stepped off the airport bus in Cork and immediately felt at home. It was like stepping into something you’ve seen in a movie a long time ago, but never forgot.
People talked to each other in the street,  told jokes at bus stops or were discussing the day’s news outside pubs. I loved it. When I went home at the end of the week, I vowed to return.
I did return. First in February of 2005, when I tagged along with friends whose band had organized gigs in Dublin and Belfast, and then in January 2006 to attend the Dublin festival commemorating the 20^th anniversary of Phil Lynnott’s death.  I liked Dublin even better than Cork.
I knew there was more in it for me.


                                  Much more

Somewhere in Spring 2006, I decided that I wanted to know what it was like to live in Ireland. I set out to research information on how to base myself there for 6 months, and how to get a job.
On 4 January 2007, I got on a plane to Dublin.


All this explains what made me go to Dublin, but not what actually made me stay.
This is what did.

What first stood out to me, was how open and friendly the people here are.
Dubliners have some interesting character trades:

- They talk a lot. All the time.
If you are waiting for the bus in Holland and address a stranger just for the sake of having someone to talk to, they’ll get a look in their eyes like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. It’s somewhere between ‘please take my money but don’t hurt me’ and ‘If you come any closer, I’ll scream’.  In Ireland, everyone talks to everyone else all the time. On the street, in shops and, ofcourse, in the pub.


- There are 3 basic accents in Dublin; North Sider, South Sider and Culchie.
The Northside accent has 2 vowels: oo and oi. Anything that can not be caught in these 2, is not pronounced. ‘Money for the bus’ becomes ‘Mooney f’de boos’.  Girl becomes goil, bird is boid and murder turns into moider. I still stick with my theory that the New York accent largely comes from supplanted Dubliners.
The Southside accent is what is generally recognized as ‘an Irish accent’ abroad, but they sort of want to make it sound like posh English. Really strange. These people stand out like sore thumbs when they cross the river into the mighty Northside.
A Culchie is someone who is Irish, but was born outside the Dublin postal code system. The Culchie accent is used as an umbrella term for all accents that are identifiable as being from somewhere in Ireland that is not Dublin. These people generally don’t appreciate all the comforts that come with living in The Big City and constantly moan about Dublin being too busy, polluted, noisy and expensive. To which I say: feel free to move back to Leitrim and either become a farmer, go work in the local Centra shop, or face a daily 2 hour each way commute. You’re welcome.

- It is impossible to walk around the streets of Dublin for more than 3 minutes without seeing someone carrying cans of beer.
- It is impossible to walk around the streets of Dublin for more than 20 seconds without seeing discarded beer cans on the street
- The only thing that is more ubiquitous on Dublin streets than discarded beer cans are scratch cards
- On Saturday afternoons, about 1 in 3 people walking around the streets of Dublin is carrying a see-through carrier bag containing a newly bought duvet.
Pro Tip, Dubliners; duvets are not single use items. They can be used over and over and over again.
- No drink is ever bad. If you don’t like a certain drink, or think it is too strong, or weak, the correct way of of indicating you won’t have a second is to say ‘I wouldn’t drink a bath tub of it’
- You can never go for just one drink. If you intend to go for ‘just the one’, no matter what the situation is, as soon as you reach the end of your drink, someone will buy a round, the juke box will play your favorite song, or the bar tender will identify you as his best friend and give you one on the house.
- If you have one drink, you will have two. If you have two, you will have three. If you have three, you will have ten. That’s just how it goes.

And while we’re on the subject of drinking- Dublin has the best pubs in the world. While some people may think that every bar in the world is the same as any other, this is not true. Dublin has a pub to cater for your every mood. Want to sip Guinness in a pub where you can hear a pin drop? We’ve got you covered. Want to drink craft beer from 30 different taps? No problem. Want craft beer but are specifically geared towards IPAs? Right over here. Interested in seeing the entire Australian football season? Ofcourse. Cocktail bars? Bars specialised in Mexican food? A pub that caters to dog owners? It’s all happening here in Dublin.
The first pubs open at 7AM and if you play your cards right, you can drink straight through to 5AM the next day. Have breakfast at one of the 24/7 Subways, Burger Kings or convenience stores and you’re good to go for the next round. Life is good here.

Oh yeah, Guinness.
The best Guinness in Dublin, and consequently the world, can be found in any of the 257 pubs that are frequently quoted as the Best Pint in Dublin by experts in pubs around the city. Ask 100 Dubliners which pub serves the best Guinness in town and you will get 98 different answers.
To be honest, it is hard to say where the best pint can be found, but it is generally a good rule of thumb to go to a place where they sell a lot of Guinness. This way, the beer keeps moving and it will taste better. Two places that are mentioned often in this debate are Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street and The Gravedigger in Phibsborough. Though The Gravedigger is really called Kavanagh’s. But don’t confuse them with 2 other pubs called Kavanagh’s nearby, which are next to each other on Dorset Street. One of those is generally referred to as Big Kavanagh’s and the other one as –you guessed it- Little Kavanagh’s. But the pub referred to as Little Kavanagh’s is actually slightly bigger than Big Kavanagh’s. Both of them are smaller than the Kavanagh’s that is referred to as Gravedigger.
But I digress.


So what is your favorite pub?

Ha! That’s impossible to say. As I said above, different pubs are for different purposes. I have been to 323 different pubs in Dublin since 4 January 2007. It is impossible to discuss each and every one of them individually here, so I’ll just shout out a couple of special mentions here.

Murray’s was the first Dublin pub I visited after I moved here, and it has always had a special place because of it. What also helped is that they showed all Celtic matches (they still do)
Through an intricate biergarten system, Murray’s is connected to 2 other pubs- The Living Room and Fibber Magees. This creates a little enclave in the heart of Dublin (I like to refer to it as The Bermuda Triangle) where you can basically spend all your free time without having to interact with the outside world. You have  traditional pub in Murray’s, that also shows sports, a sportsbar in The Living Room (that sort of functions as a pub/club hybrid after the games are finished) and a rock/metal bar in Fibbers, that caters to people who like music on the  louder end of the spectrum such as metal and punk, has a lot of live gigs and is open until 3AM every day of the week.

The Woolshed ofcourse gets a mention here. When I walked into its doors on August 5, 2007 (I’m good at dates) I knew instantly that the place was special. It has become my second home and it is one of my favorite places in the whole world. They show every sporting event you can think of, and quite a lot that you can’t, from Australian Football to Snooker and from Premier League football to baseball. And it’s the best place in Dublin for American football. And, you heard it here first, it is the place where I will see the Raiders win the Superbowl, whether they remain in Oakland or not.

Finally, before I abandon the subject of pubs, I do ofcourse have to mention the good people of the Galway Bay Brewery.  After operating  a couple of pubs in Galway, they decided in 2010 to open a pub in Dublin, and called it Against the Grain. It was a bit of a gamble, because operating a pub that only sells small batch craft beers wasn’t really done back then. When Against the Grain became a success, they opened a second pub. And then  a third one.
The count currently stands at 9. All their bars have their own specific niche and value, but my favorites, I must say, are The Brew Dock and The Black Sheep, with Against the Grain also deserving a special mention. They all combine excellent beer selections with mighty fine food, friendly and knowledgeable staff and a personal touch. Dublin wouldn’t be the same without them.

There are many other pubs in Dublin where I spent memorable nights, but none of them have become such a constant factor in my life as the ones mentioned above. They really have become an important part of my life and they really are places where everybody knows your name.


And they're always glad you came


Before I wrap up this story, there’s one final thing that keeps me here. It may seem contradictory, but one of the reasons I stay in Dublin is that it is so easy to leave.
Dublin Airport is one of the busiest in Europe, and has connections to pretty much anywhere. Add to this the fact that it is the main hub for Ryanair, Europe’s biggest and cheapest airline, and you can travel pretty much anywhere whenever you want. I have set foot on 5 continents since I moved to Dublin and I have been to some really amazing places.
Australia definitely deserves a mention here, because it really is one of the most amazing places on earth. I spent a month there in 2010 and it is a trip that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
The only downside to Australia is that it is so far away. Ofcourse, that is one of the reasons that it is so different and amazing, but it does really prevent me from going there on a regular basis. If Australia was where, say, Dubai is, I would go there every year. But unfortunately, this is not how these things work and that costs Australia a spot on the Elite List here.


There are 2 places, however, that I have travelled to in my decade in Ireland, that stand out above all others.




The first one is the USA. I always wondered what it would be like, but after a year in Ireland I decided I had to go and see it for my self. It was my first time in New York and one of the best trips of my life. America really is a place where everything is possible, if you are willing to put your mind to it. I love the country. I have been there half a dozen times now, seen amazing places like New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Boston, and will be back many times. I have set my target on visiting all 50 states  and I still have some 30+ to go. And from Ireland, it is less than 6 hours to New York or Boston, which makes it only marginally further than, say, Istanbul or Cyprus.




The other one is Spain. 4 years ago, I had never been to Spain. Then I went over on advice from a colleague who told me her home town of Malaga is amazing, and fell in love with the place after about 5 seconds. I have been to Spain 6 times now, and it has raced to one of the top spots on my Awesome Countries List. Spain is fantastic. The weather is great, the food is amazing, the people are friendly, the women are beautiful, life is cheap.. Spain, like the USA, ticks all the boxes.

So why don’t you go live there?

That is a question I have been getting with increasing frequency when people see that I have booked yet another trip to Spain.
My answer to that is that at some point I might.
But not now.
 

I feel at home in Dublin to such an extent and I love it so much that even thinking of leaving it makes me very uncomfortable. I could not face the idea of not walking down these streets every day, visiting those great pubs on a daily basis, seeing my friends here every weekend, going to the football in Croke Park.  I could not do without that.

I do have a feeling somewhere in the back of my mind that, at some point, I might decide that it is time for me to set sail for a sunnier climate, but not now.

That is for the future.