‘It’s weird how monks are allowed to drink, isn’t it?’ I ask Anton as we approach The Jolly Monk, the newly renovated bar of the Abbey Hotel. ‘I mean, as in you would think drinking would be prohibited or something.’
‘What’s weird about that? Everybody drinks,’ he says. ‘Name one profession that doesn’t.’ I think for a moment.
‘I suppose I thought that the monk was one.’
‘They named a bar after the monk’s drinking, you idiot,’ he says. ‘Look at the sign!’ A monk who looks like Neil Morrissey is holding aloft a beer stein with a smile on his face. Anton pauses in thought: ‘I suppose childminders, maybe.’
There’s something quite alluring about the idea of drinking in a hotel bar. The sense of impermanence, of mystery and briefly, fleetingly intersecting lives, in a place that is at once home and not home. The cinematic imagination has a part to play in this, surely, with the institution in its various guises over the years housing romantic trysts, capers, murder plots and the like. Suffice it to say, however, that The Jolly Monk is less Rita Hayworth wistfully fingering a martini glass at the corner of the bar and more English lads’ weekend holidayers eating from Papa John’s pizza boxes on their laps (the bar’s kitchen opens at the start of October, I’m told) and heckling nearby individuals for various infringements on their psychical comfort.
This is the precarious emotional state of the tourist writ large. Susan Sontag notes how the travelling individual alleviates her anxiety at unfamiliar surroundings by recourse to photography, engaging with her environment from the safe distance of the quotidian form; so too the Englishman with ‘banter’, or the death-spasms of the once proud colonial mindset that served historically so well as a comfort blanket for the Queen’s subjects’ baser sensibilities at the cost of the subjugation of the other. This, I suppose, is the real pitfall of the hotel bar for the native population: here, everyone is an outsider. ‘Everyone’s a spicer,’ Anton suggests.
An old man wearing a slightly-too-large crucifix necklace passes by us as we return to our seats after smoking on the terrace. ‘You’re so happy,’ he stops to say to me. ‘I wish I was that happy!’ It’s one of those exchanges, rarely occurring in life, that make your laughter very quickly give way to an implacable sadness. The back of his t-shirt reads ‘Those that shine from the inside don’t need the spotlight’ in cursive, under a picture of a candle. He will return momentarily to recite a poem of his own, printed out in an enormous folder (A2 size maybe?) about how irritating it is when people use their phones when they’re in others’ company, as though acting out a sort of inverted, Brechtian adaptation of the famous Dom Joly sketch.
The thing about pubs is, what makes them is the people. That The Jolly Monk is a comfortable, unassuming bar, with no immediate flaws to speak of (bar perhaps being a little overlit), gives Abbey Hotel the best possible chance at having a decent place for its guests and whoever else might wander in to have a drink and relax. They even do craft beer! It’s up to the patrons to do the rest. ‘Are you going to put the auld lad in your review?’ Anton asks me as we exit, waving to the barman. ‘Because the poem was shit, but it was pretty funny.’
The Jolly Monk
52 Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1
01-8728188
www.thejollymonk.ie
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
Photos: Killian Broderick
