The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Ham and Cheese Sandwich in a Dublin Pub with My Dad, the Day of the European Rugby Cup Final, 1999

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A ham and cheese sandwich in a back street Dublin pub (courtesy of ChatGPT)

This never was my town, I was not born or bred

Nor schooled here and she will not

Have me alive or dead

But yet she holds my mind

With her seedy elegance,

With her gentle veils of rain...

From ‘Dublin’ by Louis MacNeice

The otherness of the Ulsterman in Dublin has been well documented by some of Ireland’s greatest writers, but perhaps best by Louis MacNeice in the abovementioned poem. The day my father and I arrived there to watch Ulster play in the final of the European Cup, neither of us could have told you who Louis MacNeice was, and while we may have felt an odd mixture of things being in Dublin, we certainly wouldn’t have been able to articulate it as poetically as MacNeice. Indeed, we were more like two little country mice in the big city, skittering from place to place and taking shelter where we could, twitchy, nervous and on guard.

Truth be told, even though I was born in the North and lived there until 18 when I left for university, I’ve always felt foreign going to Dublin and MacNeice does fairly well here to capture the sense of difference I always felt going ‘down south’ as we’d refer to it. This should not to be interpreted as a hatred for going down south, but simply to say that given the context of our upbringing and community it always felt strange, ‘wondrous strange’ to quote Horatio in Hamlet. However, I think MacNeice’s poem as a whole fails to capture the unease that can be felt from an Ulster Protestant as myself in going down south. MacNeice, though born in the North, spent little time there, so his experience and mine will differ.

I think of the south like a kind of parallel universe to the North, and quite simply as a case of ‘so near yet so far’. It boggles my mind to think how two countries that share such a small island as Ireland and are separated by a border could be so different, and how movement from one to the other is not just a geographic one, but also a psychological and, dare I say, emotional one, particularly if, like my father and I, you were from the Protestant, British-facing community of the North.

As in MacNeice’s poem, while there’s much about the city I admire and in part love, I’ve always felt out of step with it somehow. You might think this strange, considering I was born on the same island – and I can’t speak for all northern Protestants – but there’s an odd psychology to the whole situation of living geographically on the same island as southerners, but psychologically living in a different country. Crossing the Irish border for me felt more like going through some kind of portal to another world, as opposed to simply journeying south. If you remember the programme ‘Quantum Leap’, and the character beaming himself into other times it was a bit like that, only usually a lot slower and on a bus with lots of rugby supporters stinking of beer, stopping every now and again so they could relieve themselves in the ditches of Eire.

The first time I went to Dublin was with my father to watch Ulster play rugby in the final of the European cup, at what was then called Lansdowne Road. Like many stadiums its name has now been bought by some corporation who could pay the highest price.

Anyway, let’s cut to the ham and cheese sandwich.

I remember how dark it was, the interior of the backstreet Dublin pub we ended up in. For some reason, what I remember most was how dark it was inside that wood paneled pub. It was early afternoon, so it was also empty and weirdly still. We’d got the train down, or maybe a supporter’s bus – I can’t remember exactly – and found ourselves with a few hours to kill before kick off and maybe even before we were allowed into the stadium. The pub was off the beaten track – it must have been, considering how quiet it was on the game day. Such quietness on a game day was not an advert for the pub, though. I imagine there were other watering holes in Dublin that day fit to burst and maybe even turning people away.

This was a red letter day for Ulster Rugby fans, and they’d travelled down en masse; it was Ulster Rugby’s first ever European cup final. They went on to win the match, and the championship and I can remember the pitch being flooded with fans at the end. Our seats at the stadium were on the top row of the top stand, and as someone who wasn’t and isn’t a huge fan of heights, I’ve got to admit to feeling slightly uncomfortable throughout the whole game, despite the piping hot chips before kick off, covered in so much salt and vinegar that the combination of the two almost made a paste, and that’s not forgetting the big squirt of ketchup in the corner of the shallow polystyrene tray. Those were the days of Punts, instead of Euros, and when food at stadiums like Lansdowne road, while more expensive than the high street, was eminently more affordable than now. Go to a stadium now and you’ll pay the same price for a cheeseburger as at a decent, mid-range, sit-down gastro-pub, and you also won’t get a pint without having to pay extra for some hideous, refundable plastic pint cup as a receptacle for the watery beer.

Anyway, why has this little pub stuck in my mind?

Well, I suppose it was to do with the contrast it offered to the rest of the day. Neither my father nor myself knew our way around Dublin – there were probably fifty other places we should have gone for something to eat that day, and to be honest, I’m not even sure the pub we ended up in really even served food, but anyway, after wandering around like a couple of lost souls we eventually went into this place, and I remember it being quiet and still.

My father ordered a pint of Guinness, I think, or maybe it was Bass, and to my surprise also ordered me half a pint of Budweiser. He then asked if they did any food, and the barman suggested they could ‘do’ a sandwich. These are words which hardly inspire confidence in a place, but duly we took our seats, the barman not querying my age, but giving me and my father a look which simultaneously communicated both his suspicion and permission, and brought over the two drinks and the sandwich and packet of crisps.

It hadn’t occurred to me that this was the first pub I’d ever been inside. My mother and father weren’t drinkers and certainly not pub-goers. I, myself, don’t often go to the pub and would be reluctant to take my own children, even though there is now a fine line between gastro-pubs and restaurants. I just happen to think there is plenty of time for them to go to pubs when they’re older. Anyway, come to think of it, I'm not even sure I’ve been in a pub with my father ever since that day, such was the rarity of the occasion.

Anyway, there we were, father and son in Dublin, two Northern Irish fish out of water, sipping our drinks quietly and eating our chosen half of the one shared ham and cheese sandwich. I remember the ham being thick, chewy and processed and the cheese being grated, but not freshly grated, more the kind you get from a bag, industrially grated by a machine from an industrial-sized block of cheddar. And it was in soft white bread with butter. At any rate, it was a moment we shared, alone together in the hurley burly of Atha Cliath. I suppose what this taught me was the importance of pubs or places to eat in cities. Cities like Dublin can be intense: the buskers, the shoppers, the beggars, the drunkards, the gangs of supporters, the traffic, the trains, the groups of kids hanging about on corners. And it’s important to have somewhere to retreat to, even if it is for a substandard snack, in the murky back room of a wood paneled boozer.

At that stage in my life, I’d never been to London so Dublin was the biggest city I’d been in, and I’d been amazed at the speed and velocity of it. Going on The Dart to Lansdowne Road, I cowered beside my father, not only at the huge number of people there, but the speed of the train and size of the city it traversed.

So, even though this pub was a backstreet pub, – and I don’t even think it was showing the game on a screen, as these were the days before screens were mandatory in pubs – and the sandwich wasn’t great, and the beer was wet and cold in my hand, and bitter in my mouth, and we barely talked about anything important, or talked at all, there was something about that moment that makes me remember it, a father and son united by a sense of foreignness, tourists in their own country – to paraphrase Derek Mahon on Louis MacNeice –, before putting their coats on, opening the door of the pub, and walking into the daylight, the city, to take our seats, looking out over Dublin, and waiting, side by side, for the whistle to blow.