An Irishman's Diary

I SEE London is having a “Slow Down Festival” later this month: 10 days devoted to slow food, slow walks, poetry readings, etc – and to reversing a trend towards ever greater speed and busyness that, according to the organisers, has been unchecked since the Industrial Revolution.

Conceived before the credit crash, the event seems spectacularly well timed, though I’m not sure precision timing is part of the movement’s philosophy. Perhaps this will be one of the issues touched upon in “Why Does When Matter?”, a panel discussion on cultural attitudes to time, scheduled for the British Museum on May 1st (at 6.30pm sharp).

If I understand them correctly, the festival organisers are not celebrating slowness as an end in itself. The ethos has more to do with living in the moment and savouring life, instead of always rushing from one thing to the next – a habit that in any case, they argue, is counter-productive.

In defence of the forgotten art of standing still in public places (now practised only by street artists and smokers), for example, they point to statistics suggesting that a goalkeeper who remains motionless until a penalty is kicked has a better chance of saving it.

This argument is at least partly supported by the most famous penalty save in Irish soccer history. Packie Bonner did not quite wait until Romania’s Daniel Timofte kicked the ball in Genoa in 1990 before diving. But he waited long enough to receive Timofte’s telegraph – which was legible even from here – about where it was going.

That my grandmother could probably have saved it would have been neither here nor there had Bonner gambled on diving to his left. But he didn’t, and the rest was history. As it was, he still had enough time to pick a comfortable spot of grass to fall on – he could even have spread a picnic blanket on it first – before the ball eventually arrived.

FOR ALL the economic gloom, there is still no sign of a slow-down on Dublin’s pavements. Whatever they are up to, people still seem to be in a big hurry. Nothing appears to have has changed since 1994 when, as you may recall, the city topped a global survey of pedestrian walking speeds: shattering traditional ideas about the pace of life in Ireland.

Although it fell to fifth in a follow-up survey in 2007, this was not because of any deceleration. On the contrary, Dublin walkers were still getting faster. It’s just that the general acceleration of pedestrians worldwide was even more pronounced in such places as Singapore (first in the 2007 survey) and Guangzhou (fourth).

Measured over 60 feet on a broad footpath, Dubliners averaged a sizzling 11.03 seconds in 2007, compared with a relaxed 12.0 in New York (eighth in the survey) and a ponderous 12.17 in London (12th). It is perhaps no wonder that the British capital is taking the lead in the slow-down movement. The festival’s scheduled “sloooow walk” across London Bridge at rush-hour on April 24th will not be a big departure from the norm.

Dublin, by contrast, remains a challenge for the most skilled flâneur . Even the poet laureate of boulevardiers, Baudelaire, who so loved to submerge himself in the crowded streets of Paris, seeking “intoxication in the universal communion”, might have struggled with conditions here.

“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude,” he wrote of his favourite pastime. “Enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.” I think of Baudelaire and his fairy sometimes when I nip around the corner to Heuston Station in the morning to buy the newspapers. My lateral journey across the concourse always has to be timed to avoid the arrival of a commuter train from Newbridge or Leixlip, or wherever, and the wave of humanity that then comes crashing through the station en route to the Luas.

A wrong move there and Baludelaire could take a bath of multitude, all right. If he was lucky, he might be washed up alive at the Luas terminus in Connolly, spitting out water.

Then there’s Westland Row during evening rush-hour, where once a week I find myself walking the wrong way up the footpath, while struggling with my son’s cello, sometimes in windy conditions.

I say the “wrong way” – which, at that time of day, is southbound, the direction most of the office workers in Dublin 2 are not taking. Even Baudelaire might have lost his nerve while hemmed between railings on one side, fast-moving traffic on the other, and facing four lanes of the world’s fifth-fastest pedestrians, all converging grim-faced on Pearse Street Dart station.

Perhaps here too he would have found the intoxication of universal communion; but I suspect the fear of being nudged into the path of a bus would have sobered him up.