Listen now again

Right opposite where I got off the bus after I'd missed my stop was the entrance to the new exhibition about Seamus Heaney, one of the two things I was determined to experience while I'm in Dublin.

For many years I was intimidated by poetry but when I finally found a route in I was, like almost everyone else in the sanctum, rendered speechless by Heaney's ability to turn clods of earth into flowing words then catch them just as they started to float into the air. 

Here we listen to him speaking, we read his words and watch them forming in his notebooks. Here we see how others have turned them into image. Here we inhabit his passion for Ireland, his his love for family and friends and his compassion for all people.

When he died five years ago I read that his very last words, in a text to his wife, were 'Noli timere' (do not be afraid). What an extraordinary thing to be feeling and communicating as you die. 

This exhibition, small, beautifully designed and very moving, invites us closer to a man who lived on Parnassus and always kept his feet on Irish ground, and it offers those words to us all.

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I really didn't need to do anything else today but that wasn't how today had planned itself. With our little cohort we went into Trinity College and paid homage to the huge queue for the Book of Kells. The Book of Kells was the second of my two things but the wait and a crowded viewing space weren't so we wished them luck and moved on.

We walked over the bridge as wide as it's long, we saw where Nelson's Pillar was blown up, we ambled and ended up drinking Guinness in Mulligans where James Joyce and Seamus Heaney both drank. 

Undoubtedly too, the person who formed the focus of the next part of our day, William Orpen, war painter and society portraitist. He was born in 1878 and this evening a statue to him was unveiled in his birthplace, Stillorgan, the suburb of Dublin where we are staying. The gaggle of press photographers, including one on his own step-ladder, were, I'm certain, not here in honour of Orpen and his assembled descendants, but to get the best picture they could of the celebrity unveiling the statue, Ronnie Wood. My version is in extras.

The speeches, using a microphone that had not been tested, were lost to the wind and my unfortunate inability to take seriously anything invested with even a hint of pomposity was fed a thousand times over when it was revealed that at the press of a mobile phone keypad, Orpen's brass head and shoulders were set revolving, first this evening then every 8 minutes until such  time as the mechanism breaks down in, I suspect, the not too distant future. (A rotating bust was not, I must stress, the sculptor's plan nor wish.)

Fortunately, several of Orpen's descendants joined me in my suppressed laughter and told me that Orpen would also have been mightily amused.

Then a concert loosely focussed on World War One with a mixed assemblage of singers and players, plus massed singing of 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' and 'Pack up your Troubles'.

Then, of course, a late night in the bar.