My love affair with Dublin

I think it is perfectly reasonable to love a town. Places can have personalities and changing looks the same as friends who, over the years, get better with age.

Dublin is getting better with age, with a vengeance. When I first started going there it was charming for all the wrong reasons. Everything was grubby and old fashioned, just a bit tacky and disreputable and it felt like London did when I first started coming here as a gormless midwestern high school kid. I loved the dark, dirty pubs and dusty bookstores. And the typos! Dublin then had permanent fixtures and museum exhibitions and even the posters on the street, all had their typos. Even the monument on Michael Collins's grave has a typo.

As I started studying Irish history, I enjoyed spotting the mislabellings too. But I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't love the place with all my heart. Because now, the transformation that's going on is incredibly exciting and I feel the same way I would if a friend was joining the stratosphere in their career. Couldn't happen to a nicer place.

There's still the incredible friendliness and banter. The man at passport control, the coffee shop workers and girls clustered round the mirror in the loo at the pub. You have to have a few quips to hand at all times. Everyone everywhere is looking you full in the face and quite a few people raise their eyebrows and nod at me, so I return the favour, it's only polite.

But what's happening on either side of the Liffey is simply amazing. It's everything Canary Wharf wants to be, but a ten minute walk from the central bits of 'the Northside' or Trinity and Grafton Street (ok I walk fast). Even the little cluster of buildings - "Canary Dwarf!" - fit into the landscape exquisitely. The office I was in was right on the river, just across from the reproductions of old sailing vessels, and the light at every point of the day was arresting but did not prepare me for lighting up time. The old and the new work in beautiful harmony and I feel happy about Dublin's march towards modernity, you wear it well.