Beer with subtitles

Big hands! He’s got very big hands: when he sits down at the piano, I swear fully half the keys are covered by those two hands. Boris Berezovsky – this one, not that one, which must be fun at the airport – is in town and, for perhaps the first time, we’ve a perfect view of the proceedings of a solo piano concert: cheapest tickets they may be but up here in the heavens of the National Concert Hall’s choir seats you can see (in the words and manner of Patrick Steward in “Extras”) everything.

I’d heard Berezosky’s live recording of the Godowsky Chopin transcriptions and – aside from the small revelation of encountering the default alarm clock ringtone of a former mobile phone – loved them. Take some of the hardest piano music ever written and…play it one hand. Reverse the left and right hands. Whatever tricks you can think of, he employed them.

After further research (a trip to Wikipedia), it turned out Godowsky was, in addition to a formidable pianist, a formidable personality: rehearsing once with amateur violinist Albert Einstein, Godowsky reputedly lost his patience with the greatest scientist of his time and exclaimed,

Oh Einstein, can’t you count?!

Needless to say, all of this was enough to make us swarm to the concert. It certainly didn’t disappoint although I would have loved a repeat of the Godowsky concert. The few pieces he did play were wonderful, however, as fingers rippling down the keyboard in semi-quavers suddenly reach the hard bit…and start to blur.

Is it music – or mere technical showmanship? Was it right to meddle with Chopin’s work? I can see the arguments and…no, I think it’s music and I don’t see the harm. I loved it – big hands!

Just before Christmas, I chanced upon a copy of the long out-of-print original soundtrack to the TV series “Bringing It All Back Home“. We still have most of the series lying around at home on video tape and, though I’ve yet to watch the complete series, I was keen to get one song in particular, Luka Bloom’s “You Couldn’t Have Come At A Better Time”, which is featured in the first episode.

Listening to the album, another song gradually got my attention: an epic tale of emigration, loneliness and despair, Paul Brady’s “Nothing But the Same Old Story” belongs, at first glance, to a different Ireland. Already, most Irish people have – thankfully – only faint memories of

Living under suspicion
Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes
You can see that you’re nothing but a murderer
In their eyes, we’re nothing but a bunch of murderers

For other reasons, however, the song seems strangely relevant. Just as in the 1980s when Brady’s “Hard Station” album was written, unemployment is high, the country broke and the callers to “Liveline” rage about their rising tax bills. Things were good for such a long time: wages were up, the city started to renew itself, people started returning for the first time since…ever.

However, for anybody with the slightest appreciation for what makes cities work, the problems were obvious. Dublin is a small city and it’s disgraceful how inadequate our transport system remains (five years to build two unconnected tram lines!); move outside the cosy bubble of the city centre and observe how the general lack of infrastructure has influenced a never-ending parade of housing estates, a shopping centre the only cultural advantage.

I used to work in the suburbs and the daily ritual of getting to work by public transport was like a window onto the problems of the city: board the bus at that paragon of Dublin architecture, the Department of Health, sit for 70 minutes to travel the 12 miles to work and witness first-hand the social problems of our city as the bus came under fire from rocks hurtled by disaffected youth at any of the many building sites surrounding the wild west that is Blanchardstown and its environs.

It was around then that I started to feel this was not perhaps the best way of life.

Out for a walk on a recent sunny spring evening on Dun Laoghaire pier – not incidentally, one of my favourite things about Dublin – I ran into an old music friend at the train station. We caught up and the conversation was pleasant but ended – as so many do these days – with the words,

“So, yeah, I’m fine. Oh, but, uh, I’m emigrating next week.”

All I could reply with was, “Oh, that’s funny…me too”. Not next week, of course. The arrangements are nowhere near complete. That’s the general plan, though, and it’s been a long time coming. I won’t pretend that the current economic climate has anything to do with those plans but it’s instructive to see how many others have the same plan now. Where did all the money go? We wasted our chance to improve things. There’s better places out there and I’m moving on.

I was just about nineteen
When I landed on their shore
With my eyes big as headlights
Like the thousands and thousands who came before
I was going to be something . . .
Smiled at the man scrutinising my face
As I stepped down off the gangway

It’s exactly six months since the US presidential elections. It would have been a memorable day for me no matter what, though: while the rest of the world watched Barack Obama inch toward victory, I was watching red molten lava flow into the sea as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

I was fortunate enough to be in America for the big occasion – albeit over 4,000 miles from Chicago’s Millennium Park – at the very southern-most point of the country on Big Island, Hawaii. The polls in President Obama’s home state would remain, needlessly, open for three more hours after we tip-toed back in the pitch dark toward the car, arriving just in time to savour his acceptance speech live on radio.

This was a good day. They were mostly good days in Hawaii, really. It wasn’t a destination I’d ever seriously considered until just a few weeks prior. We had two precious weeks of holiday to spend wisely, with California as a starting point. South America was the obvious first choice, although this plan was hampered by long flights (it turns out to be the same distance, and probably easier, to arrive from Europe) and finally scuppered by a complete lack of time to prepare for any vaccinations. Canada was #2 on the list, however, since we mostly wanted to see Toronto and Montreal, Europe again proved a saner theoretical starting point.

Hawaii, the outside candidate, appeared more attractive the more we researched it. Hiking was frequently mentioned on travel websites, as was scuba diving. One of the islands turned out not only had a huge volcano park but to also be famous for its coffee farms. After several holidays spent in major cities, we were both hankering after some serious scenery: after some initial scepticism, it looked  like Hawaii could deliver. Sure, it was rainy season – but how could it be any worse than Dublin?

Well, following three weeks of unbroken sunshine in the Bay Area, we arrived to grey, overcast, wet skies in Honolulu.  We had had a mind-bogglingly slow check-in procedure with Hawaiian Airlines at SFO – slow enough to eliminate any hope of a proper breakfast after an early start with a long flight ahead. Hungry and tired, Honolulu Airport felt like a massive bunker, a determined effort to block natural light with metres of re-inforced concrete and replace it with florescent tubes.

Long after our trip to Hawaii I read “Stephen Fry in America“, companion to the TV series I loosely followed via iPlayer throughout my own USA tour. Stephen completes his American tour in Hawaii and echoes my feelings upon arrival:

What a horrible, what a grotesque, what a shattering disappointment. Of all the unspeakably vile tourist hells I have ever visited, this has to be one of the worst. At least Alicante and the Costa del Sol know what they are: Waikiki seems to be labouring under the delusion that it is still a glamorous and elite paradise. I dare say it once was, but decades of thoughtless hotel construction have destroyed any beauty, charm or individulaity. [...] I go to bed cursing myself for the naievty with which I expected anything else.

Like me, however, Stephen quickly warms to Hawaii. There is a wealth of activity in and around Honolulu: the city is actually a fine place to visit itself, too, Waikiki hotels notwithstanding, and we ended up extending our stay for a day. During the two weeks we encounter coral, climb volcanoes, drive through lush green hanging valleys fresh out of “Jurassic Park” and lounge around on black, white and even green sandy beaches. We both end our USA adventure on Hawaii’s Big Island, watching new land form at what feels like the end of the known world and – in our case – listening in the dark to a new world order form on the car radio.

In lieu of an entire book, I thought it might be worthwhile posting – in addition to the photographs I uploaded a few months ago – roughly what we did each day. If you’re ever in the area and have any doubts, here’s what you can pretty easily see in just two weeks:

SUNDAY OCTOBER 26

• arrival

MONDAY OCTOBER 27

• attempt diamond head trail
• waikiki beach

TUESDAY OCTOBER 28

• pearl harbour

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 29

• hanauma bay
• climb koko head

THURSDAY OCTOBER 30

• e noa tours (with shannon!)

FRIDAY OCTOBER 31

• polynesian cultural center (with george!)
• hallowe’en at waikiki beach

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 1

• fly to hilo, big island

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 2

• tour the north-east coast
• botanic gardens
• lunch at the roadside hut
• beach
• walmart!

MONDAY NOVEMBER 3

• explore hilo town
• waterfall
• mehana brewing company
• first coffee farm
• arrive at volcano park

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 4

• hike a volcanic crater
• lava tubes
• lava flow watching
• hear the world change, live on radio

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 5

• head for kona
• black sand beach
• usa’s most southerly town/restaurant/bakery/everything
• green sand beach
• arrive in kona

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 6

• explore coffee farms south of kona
• free tangeloes!
• captain cook monument
• former royal beach palace
• painted church

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 7

• surfing/submarine
• kona coffee festival parade

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8

• fly back to oahu
• fly back to san francisco

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 9

• fly home