Gaol time

Okay, as I pointed out yesterday, the Irish are worth more than just a day.

Writing the Saint Patrick’s post got me thinking again about that trip to Ireland, and the photo of Kilmainham Gaol transported me back to the day I went there.

It was, as they say in country, a fine soft day.

Meaning it was raining. Not hard; maybe more like falling mist. (As I’ve said before, “The Emerald Isle” does not refer to precious stones. More like moss. Wet moss.)

There is nothing like visiting a prison in the rain. Even a former prison, one that’s now decked out with mostly decent lighting and is swept regularly.

(When I was selling my house in Seattle, my real estate agent made me take this photo down from the wall. She said it was "unsettling".)

The atmosphere is not light, either in terms of brightness or weight. They take you around the place in clumps, but somewhere in the execution courtyard I got unclumped because I was shooting photos and not paying that much attention to what they were doing tour-wise.

I was honing in on the door with the lock on it:

(See what I mean about the green?)

Then I turned around to find myself alone and not sure where everyone had gone, or how I was going to get there to catch them up.

Let me just say that if the lighted parts of the Gaol did not fill me with a sense of hilarity, the corridors I stumbled down made me just the teeniest bit—no, a whole lot—ill. Where I was obviously wasn’t a public area, so it wasn’t dressed up for tourist consumption. There wasn’t blood on the walls, or anything (at least that I could see), but it was monstrously dark and cramped and not a place I wanted to linger.

After some time (probably only a couple of minutes, but you begin to understand the relativity of time when you’re lost in a prison) I came across another tour clump. The guide was pissed off that I suddenly appeared from where I wasn’t supposed to have gone, but I just let him think I was an American blonde. With, you know, red hair.

I meekly allowed myself to be herded back to the central area and then walked a few blocks to catch the bus back to my hotel. As I got on and handed in my bus fare, I told the driver, “I just got out of jail.”

He paused for a couple of seconds and then replied, “Welcome back.”

Another reason why I really love the Irish.