PARTIES, PADLOCKS, PAINTINGS AND PEACE

I feel like starting backwards tonight. I'm in the hotel lounge listening to the sound of a raucous Irish sing-a-long. There can be no doubt which country I'm in: it's late on Sunday night. In England right now, everything has already wound down, ready for Monday morning. Last orders would have been almost an hour ago in The Swan or The Cunning Man and sensible old work will have filled most people's bedtime thoughts.

In Ireland, it's 11pm and the party literally seems to be stretching out to the small hours. And everyone is loving it, from the sound of it.

They also seem to enjoy shouting in the street for some reason. Perhaps I should chalk it up to passion? I suspect it is a lack of inhibition which is not entirely non-liquid-based.

"Show him the line, show him the line!" bustled a man in a football shirt in the Temple Bar area. I had stopped to pick up some wi-fi outside Costa on my way back from dinner. His pal threw his arms wide and started running into me as though I were on the opposing team. I thought I was about to be clotheslined.

"I see the line, thank you," I said in just about as English a way as possible. The pair of them stumbled off up the cobbles, cackling to themselves. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and thought about how terrified I'd probably have been if that had happened in London. But this is a different world. It's actually friendly, and even in the midst of all that usual silliness, full of a kind of irrepressible joy.

There was some big Gaelic football match on today. I think I gleaned from the sea of shirts in Parnell Street, that it had been hotly contested between the blue team and the green team.

"Ah Mayo! Your team are losers!" sang a couple of girls as they danced around two strangers in green. I couldn't see the boys' faces, because I was walking behind them. The girls in blue though, burst out laughing, and were suddenly gone.

"Ah pay no attention to them," said a voice coming alongside. A young man in a blue Dublin shirt patted the shoulder of the nearest green and began to explain how Mayo could hold their heads up and had been unlucky but deserved a lot more. I shook my head in wonder, thinking about what happens where I come from.

I crossed the Ha'penny Bridge. It's so-called because it used to cost a half-penny to get over it. A story goes that two enterprising men once asked the toll-keeper whether there was a charge for baggage. When they were told that there wasn't, one of them jumped on the back of the other and was carried across. No such toll today.

What there are though, are hundreds of padlocks bolted to the cast iron railings. I've seen this tradition before. You probably have too - it's a symbol of unbreakable love: only the holders of the keys can remove the padlock. A large number of them had names and initials inscribed on them. JJ loves VMS, Bill and Coleen are in 'love forever' and many others have chained their hearts to an old bridge.

I didn't want to by cynical but I did wonder how many had lost their keys. Each padlock of course, represents a story all of its own.

I ate tonight in an Italian restaurant called Pinocchio's. They run a cooking school there so I thought that would be a good indicator. I wasn't wrong - I had a pizza that could have come from Naples itself, and a cheesecake that was so good I couldn't finish it.

That is one thing about Dublin: there is great food everywhere - you could stay here for a month and not discover all the curious, quirky little restaurants hidden away, as well as some of the more prominent venues.

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I think I've also figured out how the traffic light system works. If the little man is red, you can cross the road, provided the lights aren't beeping. If the lights are making a sort of quacking noise, it's best to stay put. When they go green for pedestrians, they make a sort of swooshing sound. That's a good time to cross. Oh and if all that fails, just ignore it all anyway and hope for the best.

It's quite possible that bit of knowledge saved my life today. Nice.

What was nice though earlier was that the sun came out! Everything is better when the sun shines. The grass almost glows green - it's not hyperbole, it is as green as legend would have you believe outside St Patrick's Cathedral. I sat there for a while reading The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in the peaceful gardens. The sun was warm, the sky was blue, the clouds were fluffy and white - the trees were almost singing.

The leaves seemed to glimmer in that translucent way they do in early Autumn. It was quite lovely. And given the Irish weather's ability to start raining without you noticing, the sunshine was really welcome.

There was a real peace about this place. Perhaps fifteen hundred years of faithful people praying had left a mark.

Perhaps it was just arranged really nicely. Either way, while the sun revelled in the spaces between the clouds, I buttered the rolls I'd saved from breakfast and capered along with Homes and Watson, solving a case of stolen examination papers in Oxford.

I slipped the Tacky Tartan Umbrella into my rucksack and headed for Dublin Castle. There had been a castle on the site since Norman times, presumably rising up in an imposing fashion above the south side of the river. I say presumably, because in the Eighteenth Century, the whole thing was burned to the ground in an accidental fire. Only the medieval round tower remains - and what was rebuilt is a sort of courtyard of remarkably French-looking buildings and not really a 'castle' at all.

It was here that the British ruled for centuries. We Brits seem to have reacted to Ireland's growing need for freedom a hundred years ago, with a sort-of-turning the screw response. We did that a lot - one of the colonies got uppity, we raised their taxes, or worse, went in with guns and redcoats. Disaster followed. Rule Britannia eh? The tighter we turned, the more the mood changed, particularly in Ireland. In the generation before 1916, it's thought that most Irish people were comfortable with Home Rule. Yet by the time 1918 came around and the Easter rebels had been brutally executed, Sinn Fein won the election with a landslide and the fire of independence which had been lit in O'Connell Street ... became the first flickers of the Republic of Ireland. It's quite remarkable really.

Just around the corner from my hotel is the Garden of Remembrance, which silently and sombrely commemorates that key moment in British and Irish history. There is a plaque there, written in Gaelic, French and English, which you can see in this photograph. It made me think a lot about church, about vision and about leaving a legacy. I raised an eyebrow at the thought of 'melting the snow of lethargy'. 

And that was really it for today! I did also visit the Hugh Lane Gallery, and I was pleasantly surprised to find one of my favourite paintings there, waiting for me. I couldn't quite believe it was the real thing, but there it was in all its colour: Renoir's Les Parapluies, shared with the National Gallery in London, which is where I had last seen it. It made me smile.

Not least because it features a far better selection of umbrellas than I have, even with the Tacky Tartan, and the Snapped-in-half golf umbrella I got from Sports Direct.