Da....

Some time ago, a friend chided me for using the term "Da Northside", assuming that I had been using it with a mocking tone, rather than with an affectionate humour that I had thought, wrongly as it happened, was obvious. A couple of weeks back, I spent the evening with my Dad and Brother, enjoying a drink in an old haunt across from my family home. The following morning, I went for a run, shaking off a well earned hangover and thinking about an idea for a blog about my Dad. I threaded my way around my old parish, past the landmarks of my childhood: the primary school where I has started as a junior infant in my royal blue jumper and grey shorts; the , all boys, "Big School" next door to which we graduated for first class; the red brick church where I'd served as an altar boy and attended mass every weekday morning during lent as a cover for meeting the girls from the neighbouring secondary school; the hall where I'd made my first stage appearance as one of the shoe makers elves; the half hidden monument to one of the more brutal tragedies of our country's history; the small house where my parents had begun their married life nearby and a small concrete post that tested our leapfrogging skills and almost cost us our manhoods on more than one occasion, particularly after our earliest experiences with alcohol.

As I ran on, still thinking about my Dad, but now in the context of the place where I had spent so much of my youth, it struck me that while I've shared a lot of that part of my childhood that I'd spent in the green fields of Co. Westmeath, with my children and my friends, I'd never really shared that much of my life in Dublin. It was as if there were no pictures to hang in these particular rooms in the gallery of my life. Perhaps a better way to think about it would be that there are images that have needed some restoration to bring out their full colour and meaning.

In any case, this blog is a small, first attempt to redress the balance. I've kept the title because in a way, its still about my Da.