Auld ancient Ireland vs the New

In miraculous sunshine, truly transporting me to a different planet than this Cork-planet I've grown used to - we drove to Midleton, for the Jameson Experience, a tour of the old, now disused, distillery building, laced in fine tales of brewing and distilling, small feature films, and of course, a tasting at the end.

It occurred to me there that, on a weeklong visit to Ireland from, say the USA, a body could get a completely different view of Ireland than ours, gained in long slow steeping in the country. It was so clean, tidy, freshly tiled, swept, painted, orderly at the site. And it's a bit the same at Muckross House, at Kilkenny Design Centre,and Killarney hotels look to be the same. Shiny, freshly painted, new grey stone. Squared edges, crisp colour, though in heritage shades.

The Ireland I have lived in this time is more mossy, disorganised, with haphazard arrangements of windows, ugly new and dilapidated old buildings side by side. Moss grows on the sills of our car, moss grows on the wall out this window, moss grows on the buttresses of ruined cathedrals. Which, in bright sunshine, looks romantic, gorgeous, nostalgic like Easter-nests of old: not at all like way too much rain all year round.

A stunningly characterful pub will be tucked in beside a new bright yellow convenience store, almost invisible from the street front. In the pub, a group of people half my age were puddling away on fiddles, bodhrans, banjo, just for theirselves - oh and also the crowd squeezed thickly into the tiny, vertical space of the stairwell over them). Sin E!

It's odd then, to me, that the main difference in the appearance of Ireland for a short visit, seems to be efficiency. When this trait is just not apparent in Irishness - all manner of other qualities are, but not that - and yet they're portraying it out there now. Maybe it was the shot of Jameson's with cranberry that set me to thinking like this. Maybe the sun.