News of Bewley’s closure has blown my froth off

AH HERE – this is too much, a corona casualty too far. Bad enough we must suffer the absence of creamy pints and truant barbers, but Bewley’s closing its doors is surely the straw to break the proverbial camel’s back.

There are places in all our lives that mean so much more than the bricks and mortar of their construction, and that Oriental palace at 78 Grafton Street ranks close to the top of this pilgrim’s bucket list.

If all the hours I lingered beneath Harry Clarke’s stained glass windows were tallied together, they would track the ‘Ginger Man’ chapters of my youthful wanderings through an indolent haze of cigarette smoke and caffeine chitterchatter.

Ironically, my mother was much to blame for my introduction to that magical house of slothful pleasure, taking me by the hand aged eight for my first cream bun in the cosy warmth of the red velvet bench by the fire.

“It won’t be long, Johnny, until you’re a university student coming in here with your books and a girlfriend,” she promised.

And while those halcyon student days fell far short of the energetic rumpypumpy exhibited on ‘Normal People’, Bewley’s did facilitate as a love shack to romance where many a lingering 3pm coffee slowly transformed into evening kisses in Neary’s or The Bailey.

But more than the buns, beans and bustle, Bewley’s was the podium the world passed through from early morning commuters to afternoon college dossers. It was a stage to strut your stuff in anything from a seedy Navy pea coat to a spanking FX Kelly threepiece, a catwalk through the heart of the city open to anyone with an attitude and a swagger.

Eccentricity was always a valued currency within those marbled halls, such as the old boarding school chum whose career as an artist was stuttering to start. In desperation, he took to inserting a two-foot holly branch into the neck of his Afghan coat and pretending a blithe ignorance of the astonished stares as he supped his coffee with tranquil nonchalance. “Art is all about making a statement,” he confided.

A few years later his canvases were selling for IR£5,000 a splatter. Democracy ruled in that pride of Grafton Street, a cultural demilitarised zone where business, politics, art and academia squashed together in chaotic harmony.

In all of our different ways, we were living proof of Noel Purcell’s maxim that ‘Dublin can be heaven with coffee at 11.’

Thank you for the days, Bewley’s, those endless days, those sacred days you gave me.