I was in Ireland in August,1971 invited by Peter, an Irish millionaire than, now a beggar supported by a French woman.
 

My deceased boyfriend - an artist - was with me there and so was my best friend Kim Landers. We set off from Cambridge on a bus going to Wales (?) and than, on a ferry,  to a port near Dublin, where we were met by our affluent host.

Not giving us any time to wash or change, Peter took us straight to his local pub near Wiclow, where we had the honour to meet and share a drink with the owner of the Guinness Business set up by his grandfather 100 years ago. From the Wiclow mountains comes the best water in Ireland so no wonder that Guinness is such an excellent kind of beer.

Both wives of the Guinness man– the former and the present one -  came from India. He must have been attracted to women in saris. For them he had built a little copy of Taj Mahal at a lake near Wiclow.

Not only did we have a couple of pints of fresh Guinness at the pub but we were also served the best salmon I had ever had. I was in Seventh Heaven.

For one week we hardly left our host’s beautiful mansion as my boyfriend and Peter got to like each other so much that they got drunk every day just before breakfast. The housekeeper and the gardener were a very happy couple. The gardener had 10 halves of Guinness before breakfast followed by a bit of erratic gardening while the housekeeper had her habitual 5 before cleaning. My boyfriend had the time of his life. All he did was drink and take photos.

Five days passed and Kim and I were fed up and tired of waiting for the promised trip to Dublin - the city of our beloved writers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Beckett.

Quite by chance one morning I managed to get those two drunks - still sober - into Peter's Jeep and off we went to Dublin,  straight to the Trinity College to the Famous Library to see the Book of Kells. The special atmosphere of the place inspired us to exchange confidences. It turned out then that Peter was an orthodox Catholic and he drank to ease his guilty conscience. He lived in a relationship with a woman, the mother of his two sons, without the Blessing from the Catholic Church.

Of course, our spiritual experience did not last long. After paying tribute to the Statue of Molly Malone we started another drinking session under a literary name: "Leopold's Bloom Way". We visited several pubs and in the middle of the Spiritual Way I lost my Memory. But YOU KNOW
YOU ARE EXPECTED to do so when in DUBLIN