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Taylor Swift fan Ellie Rainey from Dublin reacts to the Taylor Swift waxwork at the National Wax Museum, Dublin. Photograph: Sam Boal\/Collins Photos <\/p>\nHaving kids is a little like having friends in from out of town, in that they force you to do things you\u2019d never do as a local. For the first 12 years we lived in London, my wife and I only ever saw things like Big Ben or the London Eye a couple of times; once when we had visitors over from home, and then again when our kids started to realise the images of London they saw in films and books were vastly different from their experience of our east London home. <\/p>\n
(My wife would probably like me to mention that she actually got to see inside Buckingham Palace as a guest of the royal family due to her work at a leading British charity. I won\u2019t do this, because these columns are about me, and the much more important work that I do in writing gently humorous articles that enliven and inspire, and for which the jackboot of the British crown has yet to offer any such reward.)<\/p>\n
It was hard for our kids to reconcile the place they lived in, nice as it was, with the conveyor belt of famous landmarks and incredible monuments that, say, Paddington seemed to inhabit. He lived in London, whereas Walthamstow felt 10,000 miles away, albeit somehow sharing its tube line. <\/p>\n
At home, too, this feeling is present. Ninety-nine per cent of their time in Ireland has been in either rural Derry or suburban south Dublin, where famous landmarks are thin on the ground. It\u2019s telling that when we stay at my dad\u2019s house, my kids routinely ask if we can walk to \u201cthe tree\u201d. More telling still, we all know exactly which tree they mean. <\/p>\n
But this week, seized with sightseeing fervour, I stepped back within the touristy trappings of Dublin for the first time in nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n
Between 2009 and 2010, I was part of those trappings myself. Fresh out of college, I worked as a guide on one of those free walking tours you may have seen clomping around the city centre. I can\u2019t speak for how such businesses are run today, but back then I\u2019d pay \u20ac2 per person who signed up for my tour, and it would then be my responsibility to make it back via tips. If people didn\u2019t tip or, as often happened, a stag or hen do simply decamped halfway because their hangovers were overbearing, I was still on the hook for their fees. Meaning it was not just possible but occasionally highly probable that I\u2019d finish a three-hour tour around Dublin to discover I\u2019d lost money to my employers. <\/p>\n
This experience left me with two things: a great deal of resentment towards capitalism and a bizarrely long list of tourist-friendly soundbites about Irish history. Actually, it did gave me a third thing \u2013 my next job, working at the National Leprechaun Museum, a year of my life which I cannot conceivably condense into a few pithy sentences, so will have to return to another time.<\/p>\n
Fresh with touristic zeal, we tramped into town with the kids, walking through St Stephen\u2019s Green and Trinity College, screaming back at the Viking Splash Tour, and passing Leinster House and College Green. Each were mere distractions, since the only thing my kids wanted, in fact begged us, to visit, was the Wax Museum. This had surprised us, not least since most of the figures in the brochure were not people my kids had any hope of recognising. To be honest, we had a hard time ourselves but, seized by their enthusiasm, we beat a path for its simulacral charms.<\/p>\n
Taylor Swift fan Ellie Rainey from Dublin reacts to the Taylor Swift waxwork at the National Wax Museum, Dublin. Photograph: Sam Boal\/Collins Photos <\/p>\n