Stairs from the genial kitchen/living room (just big enough for a party of four) lead up to a zen bedroom (fits only mattress and dresser) over which hangs an ideal office (just wide enough for a desk but with bookshelves on the longest wall of the structure.) Despite a small footprint, this cozy Irish flat feels house-like because of its height. An easy thirty-minute train ride from downtown Dublin, many buildings here sit low and in long rows. This one aspires up and stands at a corner, free on three sides.
Thus, as the small town here includes a glorious ocean landscape (more on this tomorrow) you might say Mr. Dash has landed in paradise.
You might say that but for the floor in the kitchen, a floor on the rise.
While there are lots of great things about Mr. Dash’s native South Africa, no one would pick it as a model of public transportation. Here, in Dublin, you never know if the bus will show up as scheduled, appear ten minutes late, or just not come at all and so become “a ghost bus.” True for trains and trams too, the regularity of this unreliability would make a German or Swissy or even someone familiar with getting around the Netherlands apoplectic.
“The global south of the global north,” Mr. Dash calls his new nation.
True, there have always been problems in this dream house. The closet door is all but impossible to open. The rug in that vaulted office is badly stained. The hot water works in the morning and the evening only. The seven recessed lights in the first-floor ceiling are operated by five separate switches, one of which does nothing at all.
All of these, he thought, could and would be fixed in good time. But then he did not anticipate the floor in the kitchen erupting.
A leak below the sink caused the lovely oak to swell and bow into a shape the height and length of a speed bump. Not only does this lead to a sit-com situation of tripping routinely inside one own home, the kitchen cabinets are already ruined and now the wedge in the floor pushes the stove up off its feet. While there is, among Mr. Dash’s current guests, some gentle concern about exploding gas, for the landlord this is an issue to deal with . . . some time, eventually, though not for about a month now.
Time in the pub? A general global south approach to imminent disaster? Disdain for renters and the contracts they sign? Why the owner is not in a panic about a kitchen that will soon need to be redone altogether is a mystery. Where the floor is headed clear enough.
Tomorrow: Middle-Class Vibes And The Irish Ideal