They tell you that Dublin is a dangerous city; rough and full of crime, like New York City used to be before Giuliani turned it into the Disneyland of your twenties. Listen, people say. You’re not to go wandering about the seedier parts of town, where the knackers in their track suits are running about. Some of your female classmates have told you about being mugged in broad daylight with a syringe full of blood, or being followed home down a dark lane. You’ve listened to all of the warnings and you behave sensibly, but the truth is that you took the warnings with a grain of salt because you never felt the supposedly sinister edge of Dublin. Somehow, even though you’d been flashed twice and saw homeless people lining the streets, it just always seemed too full of magpies and swans and greens and beautiful Georgian doors to be scary.

Now that you live alone, things are different.

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