Walking into the hotel bar to meet fatmammycat, I paused at the door to scan the room for likely candidates. Directly opposite a woman appeared to be peering at me. I peered back. For a moment we just peered, then smiled. I strode confidently forward into thin air, completely missing a booby-trap step, and reached the exquisitely composed fmc at a sort of bent-kneed stagger. I’m choosing to remember this as a dignified bent-kneed stagger and compared to other moments in the night to come, it was actually one of my more together ones. Bum! I thought. Happily, shame over my inelegant entrance was dissipated almost immediately in my excitement.

Oh Lordy God! I shrieked in my head. Oh boy oh boy oh boy – my first real live blog-meet! Jumping up and down (inwardly) I say “Hallo.”

We greet each other for the first time almost like old friends – a curious moment, strange and familiar, inquisitive, slightly shy and boisterously good-humoured all at once, and one that was repeated throughout the weekend as I met more and more bloggers. We fell immediately into delightful conversation. Fmc is all she appears on her blog and more. She is truly a dazzling force of nature; glamourous, poised, with chin raised slightly and a flick of her wrist, she declares her positions: “I’m against it!” she cries. And with toss of her hair and a decisive nod, “Eeeeeeeep! I approve!” But she’s not merely arbitrarily casting reactionary judgment, all style and no stuff. Fmc can argue her point up the street and round the block because behind every opinion lies a good deal of thought already thought and considerables already considered. I’m enjoying myself. We drink and it is good.

Then we head off into town to meet her charming paramour in one of Dublin’s finest old-style bars. A top night ensues and I know that should the rest of the weekend turn out to be crap, the chance to meet these bright, funny, warm-hearted people has already made the trip worthwhile. And then Gimme shows up! Gimme! By this point I am well on my way to inebriation and to be honest I recall little of our meeting save that I was delighted to meet him and only slightly concerned I may be dribbling. We drink more.

At some point, I cease to remember much of anything at all. And then it is morning. Later I learn that I was poured onto my bed by the sterling fmc and her capital paramour. It had been tricky obtaining my key from reception apparantly:

“No, sorry, we don’t know her room number. Her name? Oh yes, uh… she’s Sam, Sam…um…Problemchildbride?…uh… (Intense chatter)… Yup, we think it begins with a Z”

The receptionist gives them my key, shrewdly deducing that we are not frauds or robbers for, really, what villains would burden themselves with such a pitiful drunken creature? By hook, and probably they had to use a crook too, I am deposited in my room. I remember nothing except a brief flash of thought “Oh. We walk now. Yes” when we were walking back to the hotel.

Friday.

The hurty hurty hurt. It hurts so! My plans for a Joycean tour of the city that day come to naught. I reel about my room for a while bouncing off walls and furniture. I lose many minutes staring out of my window in a stupor watching the smart people striding up Harcourt Street, purposeful, responsible. How strange to be them, I think, as I turn and reel about the room some more.

I get it together enough to shower and go out for a sandwich which I eat in the gorgeous, secretive and nearly missable Iveagh Gardens across the road, the one and only sight I see that day. The short walk exhausts me so I return to my room to sleep some more for tonight I party again!!

Tonight rolls around at about 4ish. I go down to the bar to wait for Devin, one of the people I am most excited to meet. Devin is as down-to-earth as they come, funny as all heaven and hell, and has the kind of nailed-it prose writing style that’ll keep me reading Hangar Queen for years and yelling “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?!” at my pot-plants and kettle. In she walks with an enormous, gorgeous smile, not looking for a second like she’s just come off a delayed transatlantic flight, and for the rest of the time she’s in Dublin we spend a good deal of it in each other’s company. I get the better end of that deal and I feel strongly that the warmth I felt for her via email and the blogs were spot on. Quick-witted, generous and genuine she is the perfect companion. We chatter. We drink.

We duck up to mine with our beverages in hand so I can change and soon we’re heading down to the bar again to meet fmc. Dev has covered that beautifully already so I won’t try except to say that it’s true folks, fmc can control a waiter from across the room with one twitch of an eyebrow even when he’s facing the other way! It’s incredible! Dev can do some pretty arch eyebrownastics herself. It’s only I of we three early supster-sisters who has to actually push mine up with my finger.

We drink at least 3 more and it is great fun, then we part, for Miss Cat is off to Galway early the next day for some noxious work thing. Dev and I make our way to Mulligan’s which we utterly fail to find. We are guided in to land at the bar by Bock on the phone. We squeeze our way through a heaving mass of Dublin men (where are all the women?) which alternates wildly from being deeply unpleasant to really quite pleasant indeed. I make a mental note to never let up on flossing. I have no idea who we’re looking for but Dev and Bock have met before and pretty soon they have honed in on each other across the assorted humanity, greeted each other, and I am meeting Mr. Bock himself.

Mucho delightful curls and as merry as you please, Bock is not nearly the angry man in person that he often is on his blog. And oh what mischief is in these eyes! Behind them he has whole evolved worlds of smarts, wit, acid and extraordinarily beautiful fairy stories – the great mystery of Bock is how all that anger can sit with all that tenderness and whether both things come from the same spot. Bock’s a dear man and a fascinating puzzle. And he has food! A cottage loaf fresh from Limerick that morning, Oh dear, sweet man – did he know how hungry we were? I tear into it like a beast.

In between and sometimes through great unladylike gobs of cottage loaf I meet Conan, Eolai, Medbh and Mr. M in that order but as Medbh and Mr. M are at the other end of a big table in a thundering bar I don’t really get to say much to them at this point. I know that I have the whole weekend to get to know the others but Conan’s only in Dublin for one night and I need to need to drink as much Drumm as I can. We yell at each other, inches apart in the noisy pub. Conan is like your favourite professor, the one you like to drink with, the one whose brain you want to pick about everything, the one you probably have a secret crush on. He is self-effacing, gentlemanly and whipsmart funny and he has the most open and kind smile in the world. I wish he could have stayed on for the awards on Saturday.

And then I get to meet Eolai, of whom I’d become very fond, especially on American Hell. Thoughtful, eccentric and beardy the first thing you notice about Eolai is how still he is. I noticed it several times over the weekend. All around him is whirling, noisy life and he sits in the middle of it almost perfectly still – save for his Guinness arm – like the eye of a storm, watching it all, processing it and letting it back out again in hilarious little comments, cartoons and vibrant art. Eolai is deep, honest, sincere and utterly utterly himself in the way many students try to cultivate but can’t pull off without grandstanding. He is a treasure and I am fonder of him still.

That night I don’t get much of a chance to talk to Medbh and Mr. Medbh but later in the weekend I do. Gorgeous, bright as a well-educated button, petite Medbh with her fire-engine red boots is dynamite, channeling a cross between Bette Davis, Jackie Kennedy and Gloria Steinem. An acute social observer, she has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of films and popular culture and a considered treatment of both. Far from being a stuffy academic though, she bristles with irreverance and fun and is great company. Mr. Medbh is superfit, quiet (and who could blame him in a room full of bloggers) but garrulous after a Guinness and he held his own in a world which many spouses just do not get, nor want to.

So there we were at table. Bock’s scar was just out of my reach for groping sadly. And it did look quite the most gropeable scar in the room which doesn’t sound like much of a compliment until you realize that the room had 7 million people in it plus bar-staff. I did cop a feel of Eolai’s beard by night’s end though, and Gimme’s. Of the two, I’d say Eolai uses more of a moisturizing conditioner on his for movement and shine, while Gimme’s all about volume and va-va-va-voom with his beard-care routine. Both beards looked like they had just stepped out of a salon in any case despite the windy weather. Both were very satisfying strokes. And Conan twinkled at me! With his lovely warm smile – a veritable eye-twinkle, as though from a much brighter Sean Connery! *Swoony*. At that point the best I could do was wave to Medbh. Time to move on for we’re all ravenous.

Wandering and biddable as a herd of cats (we nearly lost Conan up an alley) we wound a wet, windy way to a warm, salty lump-selling eatery and ate. Then we repaired to Dev’s and my hotel for more drinks, and there we met Gimme. Angry man, devoted family man, veryveryfitman, full-of-pith and vinegar man, wittywittyfastman and above his luxuriant mufti beard, an exceedingly kind, smiley-eyed man. I saw Gimme every night I was in Dublin but I never managed to have a proper one-on-one yack with him yet. I’ll do a better job of cornering him next time.

Now, lest there be cynicism at just how fabulous I found all these people to be, remember the circumstances of our meeting. In many of the most important ways I already knew and liked them. Blogging friends are self-selected. They aren’t the people you happen to know from the office and for better or worse go out with on a Friday, they are people with whom, long ago, online, you have met and clicked. You talk with these people almost daily, certainly weekly, and you build up a relationship. At any time you can walk away from that by simply not visiting them any more but you choose not to. You go back and back again because you want their particular brand of writing or humour or want to know what they think about a particular thing. Conversations run from the serious to the inane and political to personal. You get to know people in a different way. People from half a world away whether geographically or psychologically. You get to know them well enough that when you disagree it doesn’t matter because you respect and know them to be good, honest people. You learn a lot. Blogging is a strange mixture of the solitary and the social and when bloggers get the rare treat to meet each other we are tremendously excited about it to the point that it might baffle our regular pals. I already knew I liked these people a lot. Having met them, i can honestly say that I have all the time in the world for every one of them. I hope to know them all for many years to come.

Next up – The Blog Awards.

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