Dublin again

The Tour of Trinity College was conducted by a PhD History student with a wry sense of humour. My favourite moment was his description of the building housing some of the academic staff. The door to the bathrooms leads directly out to the quadrangle. His comment: if you've ever seen your professor in his bathrobe scurrying out one door and in the next, you lose all sense of gravitas. Just hope he has his bathrobe on or you'll never be able to focus in a lecture again. The tour ended at the Library and the exhibition of the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts. I saw the Book of Kells when it visited Canberra many years ago, but I enjoyed the exhibition. The Library is fascinating. It was deliberately built to be just longer than the library at Cambridge. They didn't need the space. When deciding how to organise the books they came up with a novel idea. If you order books by author, or subject, or Dewey number (when did that start?) you'll get tall books and short books all mixed up and the shelves will have to accommodate the tallest. What a waste of space! So they decided to order them by height and built the shelves accordingly. Tallest books at the bottom, graduating to the shortest at the top of a basically two storey building. Logical? Not really, but it has stayed that way for hundreds of years. If you want one of these tomes, you need to ask a librarian to fetch it. No photos allowed unfortunately. The other interesting library fact is that Trinity has a copyright license which entitles it to a free single copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. So you can imagine how big the library is. They are not stored in this one, they have another huge library off campus. There were several museums to choose from, and I chose the Archaeological one. No surprises there. It had the most stunning collection of gold I have ever seen. Hoards of gold pieces have been found in various bogs and they are breathtaking in their beauty. Arm bands, torcs, huge ear pieces, clothing fasteners and jewellery. They also had a collection of bog bodies. I'll put the photos up in a separate collection so the squeamish don't need to look. It's fascinating to see the detail that has survived. One man had all his hair there, as if he was still alive. Another's finger nails were still perfectly formed. They also had a wonderful collection of Celtic ornaments and designs leading into the Christian period. I went to two art galleries. In the first we looked at the Irish artists in particular. Unfortunately much of the gallery was closed for renovation. The other one, the Hugh Lane Gallery, had a big collection of modern art with one floor dedicated to an artist In the world I live showcases an installation of works by internationally acclaimed Irish artist Lawrence Carroll.  Carroll's works reflect the artist's humanity and despite their large scale they exude a particular intimacy. Part of this is due to his working process and his attitude to materials. His works use materials already employed for some other purpose and the signs of this use are still visible. His working process transforms them into highly personal works, while losing nothing of this previous life.Lawrence Carroll. What does it mean? Good question. He takes canvases, cuts them up, stitches them back together, waxes and coats them and includes thing like boots into it. It was weird, but I liked it. I had a chat to the supervising guard, and we agreed that it worked because there was a large collection of them. Just one would simply look odd. He also said that the main criticism visitors have is the lack of accessible information about the art works. The above quote was clear and concise in comparison to many presented.