I walked through Dublin the other day the way you do when you’re not really walking through Dublin.
Not for errands.
Not for exercise.
Not even for the usual mild resentment.
It was more like I was doing a tour I wasn’t being paid for.
Which is a terrible habit to have, by the way. Once you’ve spent years pointing at buildings and telling people things they could have read on a plaque, your brain starts doing it automatically. You can’t just cross O’Connell Street. You have to cross it with commentary.
I started near College Green, where the buses all seem to be negotiating something personal, and where tourists always look slightly alarmed, like they’ve accidentally wandered into a live rehearsal.
I used to stand there with a group and say something confident about Trinity, and someone would always ask if the Book of Kells was written by Kells.
I don’t miss that part.
I kept going, down towards the river, past the spots where you can still feel the city doing its daily performance. Dublin is very good at seeming casual while also being quietly in charge of you.
The Liffey was doing what it does, which is existing with no interest in your plans whatsoever.
I stopped for a moment, not because it was especially poetic, but because I realised I’ve been doing this walk for years and never once thought of it as a walk. It was always a route. A job. A way of moving people through a story.
Now it felt like I was the one being moved.
There was a Luas platform nearby, and I had the usual instinctive reaction, which is to stand in exactly the right place and judge everyone else. It’s comforting, having something you’re good at. Even if what you’re good at is tram etiquette.
I’m going to be unbearable in Spain.
That’s the thing.
I’m moving to Valencia soon. Not permanently in the grand dramatic sense, but enough that it counts. Enough that I’ve started noticing “last times” without meaning to.
Last time I’ll have to explain to someone that Temple Bar is not, in fact, where Dubliners go for a ‘quiet pint’.
Last time I’ll stand on a bench that’s somehow positioned directly in the wind, as if the city council has a private agreement with the weather.
Last time I’ll be able to give directions without panicking.
My brother rang the other night, very casual about it all.
He’s already over there, settled in, acting as if moving country is something you do between lunch and dinner.
He said Valencia is good. Busy. Proper city. Life happening all around you.
Then, in the way people do once they live somewhere, he started talking about escapes.
Little places along the coast.
Towns people disappear to at the weekend.
The Spanish version of saying “we might head down to Wicklow for a bit.”
He mentioned Javea, almost offhand, like it was nothing.
I did what I always do. I looked it up. Not because I’m buying a villa on the spot, but because my brain cannot hear a place name without wanting to understand the map of it.
I ended up on A Place in Javea and suddenly I was reading about somewhere I’ve never been, imagining myself doing the same thing I do in Dublin, except with better weather and much worse Spanish.
It’s strange, the way a move starts before you go anywhere.
It starts in little tabs open at midnight.
It starts in conversations where someone says “you could get the train down for the weekend.”
It starts in the realisation that you’re going to go from knowing everything to knowing nothing.
Back in Dublin, I kept walking.
Past the GPO, where I’ve said the same lines so many times they’re practically stitched into my coat.
Past the Spire, which remains exactly what it is: a thing you meet people under because you have to meet them somewhere.
And I thought, this is the last tour I’m not giving.
Not officially. No group, no umbrellas, no man from Ohio asking if the Troubles are over.
Just me, walking through my own city like a visitor, trying to notice it properly before I become the person squinting at street signs in Valencia, pretending I’m not lost.
Dublin will still be here, obviously. It always is.
But I won’t be standing in the same places, saying the same things, knowing exactly how the day will go.
And part of me is relieved.
Part of me is absolutely bricking it.
Anyway.
If you see a man on a Luas platform in a few months’ time, standing far too correctly, that’ll be me practicing for Spain.
