To the fair city

As I leant out of the train door at Stafford station, there, to plan, were son, son's partner and son's partner's mother. They'd started their journey from Bristol ten minutes earlier than we'd started ours from Oxford and we continued together, mostly asleep after last night's late packing, to Holyhead. Where we discovered that we'd booked ourselves onto separate ferries. A bit of amiable efficiency from the railways people and that was sorted. We left Holyhead in dry mid-day sunshine, ploughed through rain in the middle of the Irish Sea and arrived in Dublin to shiny wet brightness.

Although we're staying five miles south of the city centre, I wasn't going to spend my first night ever in Eire missing out on the Dublin craic so we piled into a taxi and became tourists, listening to buskers in Grafton Street, finding somewhere for an extremely late meal, and missing the last bus back.