My New Best Kept Secret

In one of his recent columns, The Fast Lane in FT Weekend, Tyler Brulé, a sort of über metro-cosmo-sexual-politan, founder of Wallpaper magazine, decreed that the three vital ingredients for a well planned city were good water pressure, good coffee shops and I can’t remember the third. The importance of a bristlingly powerful, hot shower succeeded by quality caffeine can’t be underestimated as a great way to start the day and get the creative juices flowing. I would add a blue sky, but the local authority can’t really be blamed for the weather. And for Brulé, a sign of a great hotel location is proximity to a good running area, be it a leafy park avenue or, even better, a riverside.

My room for rent just about fulfils all his desires, with its proximity to a bit of the Dodder and a slice of running track still visible in the metropolis that is now UCD. I must remind him to visit Dublin soon, where this corner of D14 just got a hundred per cent better in the last six months. The aforementioned college just opened its new gym with the only Olympic size pool in Ireland (correct at going to press!)

Not being a big fan of gyms, I reckoned if I cycled the five minutes to it, I’d have done a good workout already. That just leaves twenty minutes to skim through my programme.  At half-price for former students, and free to current students, it’s affordable once you’re willing to use the communal changing rooms for the pool. Rather, the changing village as they call it. It is brilliantly planned; there are disrobing cubicles, shower cubicles and lockers, so nobody should be caught in the actual nip. Obviously, you wouldn’t really want to bump into someone you’d been on a date with, limping from the shower to cubicle with stringy wet hair, gamely holding your swimming togs in place.

Then things got two hundred per cent better when they opened a cinema. I’ve seen four movies there already, which is four hundred percent more than in the last two years. Strangely, nobody has commercialised it, not a vending machine or garish stall in sight, just a clean, well designed space. I mentioned this to CC#2, who’s in his final year over there, and asked him where was the new bar, so I could plan meeting friends when we all come out of hibernation.

‘New bar? There’s no bar in UCD, they closed them all down, they were making too much money.’

Can you believe that? Belfield Bar, the incubator of some great romances, and great bands, no doubt, all consigned to history. So, that’s why they have cheap student nights all over town, there’s nowhere for them to hang out on campus.

Even though CC#2 has 'free' gym membership because I’ve paid for it in the Student Levy, he never uses the student centre, according to him, I'm there more than any of the actual students.

Which brings me to a journey we haven’t done in years, mother and son going to the cinema tonight. 7 Psychopaths. What fun! Thanks, UCD Cinema.