If Friendship Has A Colour …

If friendship has a colour, for me it is the mellow honeyed amber glow permeating every snug crack and cranny inside Dublin’s Palace Bar, glancing discretely off each polished hardwood counter, mirror frame and high stool, suffusing the backroom round tables and red weathered leather chairs, the light of illumination and memory reflected in every looking glass, stained glass whiskey advert and ornate skylight.

Sure it’s an old friend in itself, the ordinary man’s street regal Palace.

It’s where myself and Mick have been meeting up regularly for the many years that we care to remember.

This unchanging ever-welcoming Victorian pleasure dome is our place of regular expression of a bond that has us entangled us, each meeting a renewal of our unmentioned vows of affection and attachment.

Would we ever say this, or even try and disentangle those happy knots of kinship and shared experience, of rambling talk and tales and tangents still waiting to be further explored?

Would we heck.

But we could if we wanted to. That’s the point.

We kind of do sometimes, and kind of laugh it off as one of us heads to the bar, or descends that narrow stairwell to the tiled men’s toilet, to clear the system as the city feet clatter across the boarded over walk-on skylight overhead.

There are limits to what we will talk about, it’s just we don’t know what they are, and we are ever free to disagree, to disclose, or to divert and glide around as we see fit.

Pushing through the brass-handled, satisfyingly ample front door, and treading once more the familiar wooden floor, striding through the narrow front bar is like simultaneously entering a chapel and a cosy, chattering sanctuary, a womb of easement and reassurance, where conversation is king — no music allowed, only the odd live session —  and a point of plain is your only nostalgia.

The chapel effect is amplified by the dark wood panelling, Romanesque arches and the tabernacle-shaped dividers along the main old mahogany bar and by the vaulted ceiling.

Our meeting point is always the back room, antique glass house of bright delight by day, and gilded living room of an evening owing to the wonderful skylight above. 

The old photos and portraits of a nation’s writers, poets, painters and Irish Times journalists adorn the walls — a few, like the late great journalist Con Houlihan have made it to mini bust status — our supposed heirs and heroes, including the worst likeness of Samuel Beckett this one has ever seen. 

This latest meeting has gone ahead even though Mick is suffering through a second course of antibiotics for a bronchial ailment — “I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he says, brushing off the ‘ya poor oul divil’ blandishments — and we haven’t met for more weeks than usual because he was up to his gills in projects due for the gardening course he had happily foisted upon himself.

The slagging starts before he has his gilet off — blue, to which I feign shock, considering almost everything he wears is one shade or other of navy with the odd maroon top thrown in for unintended contrast — despite his love of colour and texture in flowers, people and everything, and which he always notices.

There’s a Guinness coming for him and the mellow honeyed amber glow of my long skinny Moretti lager to sup on as we launch into our unrehearsed but long practised conversational loop.

There’s obvious jumping off points in our shared sporting interests, chiefly rugby and Gaelic games, which Mick, with many years down as coach and mentor, is the most astute dissector of I have ever met, and we invariably delve down into the deep psychology of sporting achievement and endeavour,  which has never exhausted us.

It was Mick who put me wise that time I was going on again about what I saw as the beyond the norm nasty streak that ran through the great Kilkenny teams under Brian Cody.

Sure isn’t it a thing of wonder in itself to be challenged by a friend, by one who respects and regards you, and would not abuse you in the name of disagreeing with you.

Slag you? Oh yes! Take you down with a well-aimed jest or word coup? Of course.

Does one good, in fact, to be disproven, or to put one’s projections and presumptions up to the real light of disinterested scrutiny.

That time, he let my lager-fuelled rant blow on, before deflating me with a disabusing, indulging smile, as he simply pointed out how top class sportsmen are just different from us recreational ones … warrior spirit is a double-edged thing and serious sport really is a whole new ball game.

Everything is to be compared with everything else, and now we admire the tall bar man, who scouts his clientele like a clever centre-half forward, reading the ebb and flow of the ambience, the better to time the perfect run to the tap to put on another Guinness, or clear the counter to release his wingman to unload another round of bevvies.

Time has beaten both our faces and slowed our bones, Mick and I, but it has also beaten our conversational pipes into finely calibrated instruments of conjecture and convivial exploration.

With regular replenishment of our tipples, we are in our element.

Yes, there is talk of births and deaths, and a myriad calamities and celebrations, but as Derek Mahon said, ‘There is no need to go into that’.

Another great thing about the Palace is it breeds respect and civility, and patrons who engage too loudly, are usually soon toned down by the gentler murmurings around them. Or else they up and head for livelier things in the nearby Temple Bar tourist hot spot.

No harm done, just the wrong fit for this particular Palace.

It’s also a great place to sit back and take in people, or engage the ‘watchful heart’ as Mahon put it. 

This particular evening, at one point as Mick was at the bar, my attention was gathered in by the two elderly couples at the table beside us. 

They were there before us and I had clocked the walking stick between my chair and that of the man nearest me as I sat down.

Now, doing that intense scrutiny thing without appearing to be in interested in the slightest, I pleasured in the easy familiarity between the couples, the two women garrulous and touching the other’s sleeve regularly for emphasis, the men’s comments contrastingly pithy, and measured out, in between bursts of intense exchanges, all deeply digested, and occasionally they would slip seamlessly into the slipstream of the women’s breathless confabulation.

My neighbour stood up, unsteadily, and reached for his cane. It took a moment for this slight man to reach his full unremarkable height, and all the while he rested one gossamer hand on the portly shoulder of his companion in the smart wine-coloured jumper, with the full head of silver hair.

His friend just let the hand rest on his shoulder, no remarks passed, no fussy blandishments. He was just there, Always there, maybe. I think it was the lack of recoil on the first touch of hand on shoulder that spoke most eloquently to me of friendship and trust.

Still talking to her companion opposite her, the neat, tiny woman with the well-cut blonde bob on the cane man’s right arose, and reached to assist her man as he put on his jacket, not even looking at him or the jacket. It reminded me of a knitter at work, talking away as fingers danced and darted with effortless expertise. A tiny adjustment here, a pause there to allow him to proceed in his own time, taking the tension from his shoulders as his hand emerged finally from the second sleeve  

Only when the jacket was on did the taller, silver-haired woman rise, and the man in the wine-coloured jumper.

And off they went. 

Okay, you can never really know people, but in my waking Palace reverie, I fancied I saw more true love, affection and kindness in the tiniest gestures between these two elderly couples in two minutes than in the hours of backslapping and air kissing I have witnessed in my time.

Love? Friendship? The real things. Is there any real difference between them, only maybe there’s a bit more hugging and kissing … in friendship! 

And so ultimately my pal Mick and I must go our own ways, and we do, again, leaving the warm glow of our special place behind us, to go to our other special places.

If ever there was a venue to catch up and carry on with the special people in your life, we reckon, Mick and I, we know just the Palace.