Caroline O'Donoghue: The SHARE hut, the Gingerbread House, Freakscene - 14 things I miss about my Cork
Paul Street: where Cork goth culture and all of its offshoots lived and died for many years. Pic: Denis Scanell.
I was born in Cork, but I don’t think you’re really ‘from’ anywhere for the first twelve years of your life. Life is a series of being driven places and being picked up from three hours later.
You might, in the scope of a Cork childhood, be blessed with the odd day trip to Inchydoney or Gougane Barra, but your sense of these places as fundamentally ‘Cork’ destinations does not come until years later.
Your own personal version of ‘home’ happens when you’re old enough to make choices, develop preferences, and have a set of rituals you develop within your peer group. At eleven, ‘my’ Cork was walking into Douglas on a Saturday to meet my best friend Mags. We would then spend the next eight hours walking around Douglas Court in concentric circles.
At 13, we were both sent to school in the city centre, and our Corks opened up considerably.
It was, on reflection, a fabulous way to grow up. Walking down Patrick’s hill in our school uniforms, complete with preposterously high court shoes provided by Shoe Zone, all of Cork city our oyster until the 5pm bus.
It was the kind of long, slow, teenage mooching that seems to exist in a different time zone.
A curry chips from Abrakebabra could last an hour between four people, and a 10-pack of Silk Cut Purple could last a week. For the next eight years, this was my Cork. One that was characterised by having nothing important to do and nowhere important to be. Apart from college and my 20-hour a week job at HMV, life was a series of long cafe dates with a clutch of people who were desperately important to me, many of whom I have not seen in years.
We broke up or we fell out or – most commonly – we just grew apart. Many of them, like me, moved abroad. Although I have some of their phone numbers I do not, in any real sense of the word, know how to use them.
If I sound wistful, it’s because I am. The news of Level 5 has hit me like it has hit the rest of you. With sadness, with complacency, and with perhaps too much sentimentality about Christmas.
No running into old classmates on Stephen’s night; no grabbing a coffee with an old acquaintance you just happened to have run into in the Waterstones queue; no impromptu cocktails with the friend who is now a doctor in Boston.
It makes my heart sick like it makes yours. The only reassuring thing here is that while all our Corks are different, all our sadness is the same.
Some of these things are eternal. Most refer to a very specific place in time, shops that no longer exist, streets that are utterly changed. Some of it is different, but all of it is Cork.
1. I miss Patrick’s Street at Christmas. I miss the way that Cork comes into itself fully in December, when the weather is cold and dry, and the heat from the department store doorways are blasting into the street, and the teenagers in yellow jackets are begging for shrapnel.
2. I miss the SHARE hut, the little shed just past Washington Street where the Higher Ups (read: slightly older teenagers) at SHARE would sometimes have a lock-in after the day’s collecting was done, and where once, I was allowed to be at the lock-in with them. I was unbearably tense the whole time, but it made walking past the shed for the next six years incredibly satisfying.
3. I miss Paul Street, where Cork goth culture and all of its offshoots lived and died for many years. Goths, skaters, stoners, moshers, mini-moshers (read: the young ones, like me, who didn’t listen to metal but liked wearing Emily the Strange t-shirts) all came together in collective resentment to gossip about who had sex in the Gingerbread House toilet.
4. I miss the Gingerbread House.
5. I miss the year where I had a boyfriend who worked at the Mahon Point cinema and I could see movies for free.
6. I miss Washington Street in 2004, which I personally thought of as the beginning and end of high culture. It had the Kino, it had the original Plugd records, it had a little shop that sold fake Chinese antiques and jade bracelets. It had a Subway.
7. I miss Preachers during the years my elder brother managed it, and when having an older brother who managed a bar meant something.
9. I miss KC’s, and I miss being small enough to be frightened by the picture of the big crocodile in KC’s.
10. I miss the doorway of the Father Matthew Hall at one in the morning, where I first learned the meaning of the phrase ‘heavy petting’.
11. I miss 2009, and going into Zavvi with my best friend and then-housemate Ryan to sell our DVDs to buy wine.
12. I miss the long-held crush I had on a man called Anthony who worked in the Brown Thomas menswear department. Sorry, Anthony: I never knew you well enough to miss you, but I miss having a crush on you. All that secrecy and planning. It was fantastic.
13. I miss going into the Imperial Hotel specifically to use the bathroom.
14. I miss the Echo man. My heart belongs to the Examiner, but Cork isn’t really Cork without the Echo man’s call. Bellowing down Oliver Plunkett Street, tickling your frozen ears, the evening as blue as the cast on a duck’s egg. All of our Corks might be different parallel universes. But he, surely, is in all of them.
