Edition of ‘Dubliners’

Edition of ‘Dubliners’ I just got for one euro in a shop called Kringloop - a place packed to the brim with curious knick-knacks and miscellaneous items of random. This yellow-paged copy was printed in 1974.

Flicking through, I positioned my nose between the ending of Two Gallants, page 60, and the beginning of The Boarding House, page 61, sucking strongly through both nostrils, the aroma prompted a pleasant, dust-smeared memory of my granny and grandad’s in Cork. There, I would wonder about as a child: wax jackets under the stairs, toes plunging into deep carpets, clanking milk bottles, the crack of a boiled egg with the back of a spoon and the grey static fuzz of the thick-arsed tele, humming away, buzzing our fingertips.