Thanksgiving

I am thankful that I am of sound mind and body.

I am thankful for the opportunity to work in a field I love, in collaboration with people I respect and learn from.

I am thankful for a place to sleep and food to eat.

I am thankful for my friends, who are more generous and more numerous than I deserve.

I am thankful for the love of a good man, whom I esteem more highly than anyone in the world, now or ever.

An End to Controversy

I spent most of today wandering around Dublin peering at buildings and occasionally stepping inside of them and stepping out again, as is my normal approach to unfamiliar cities. During this meta-transect, I stopped in to the Irish National Gallery and saw a lot of paintings by Yeats's brother, interrupted a sextet rehearsing a modernist chamber piece, tramped around in the coffee shop that appears in Ulysses, fondled various rare coins and medals, and walked the grounds of Trinity College pretending to be the time-traveling love child of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Becket (who in order for this to work were also time travelers).

As I did not have a guide (my friend Jen has a cold and was abed), I had no one to contradict my theories about the architecture and history of the city. Resultingly, it is my unfounded belief that the English built a lot of imposing gray stone pillared edifices beyond all human proportion in an attempt to fool the Irish into thinking the English were giants. Instead, it made the English occupiers look very small. Trying to make the best of a bad job, the English claimed they were leprechauns. The Irish immediately kicked them out and began tearing down buildings to get at the gold. To remind themselves of where things had been, the Irish filled the now-empty lots with 1960s brutalist office blocks. Never forget.

Otherwise, the place is mostly the brightly-painted wood fronts of pubs, coffee shops, and jewelry stores. There are also more shops selling musical instruments and sheet music than I have ever seen in one city. In proper day-after-Thanksgiving fashion, I got in a bit of Christmas shopping.

It was not until nearly five o'clock that I remembered I had a mission. There is a biscuit called The Kimberley which has proved divisive in the tea-drinking community. Specifically, the Irish claim it is the best biscuit in the world, and fondly reminisce about it each time grandmothers are mentioned, whereas the British believe it tastes like damp cardboard with some marshmallow on it.

I spent the next hour racing from shop to shop (they close at six), not finding Kimberleys or their close cousin, The Mikado. Is it possible Dubliners don't know that the Kimberley is discussed in Internet circles as avidly as Guinness and Jamesons - that it is a legend indelibly marked on the world stage as the only truly Irish product, the very litmus test of Irishness? Was disaster on the horizon? Had there been a complete cultural meltdown led by the tech boom and the proliferation of Tesco?

Fortunately, through quick thinking, I managed to find some at that bastion of local pride, the station news agent's, and hurried home to make the cuppa necessary for proper sampling.

I can tell you now that The Kimberley tastes nothing like damp cardboard with marshmallow on it; it tastes like damp gingery Nilla Wafers with low-sugar marshmallow fluff. I don't see how such confusion could have arisen. I'll have to buy another packet to take back to London with me, as I have already seen off half of this one.

After that, I intended to go back out and drink whiskey and listen to Irish music, but it turns out that a five hour walk in near-freezing conditions is tiring. So I stayed in and drank whiskey and watched The IT Crowd.