Sure, bogans are unpleasant. Chavs are somewhat grotesque. But knackers are something else. Imagine, if you will, a woman dressed in a pink tracksuit. The outfit is ill fitting, such as to reveals a torturously stretched playboy bunny tattoo at the base of her spine, and another tasteless ink figure on the back of her squarish neck. Her hair is a mess, and partially bleached. Her mouth spews words of not-quite-formed English in an utterly incomprehensible and charmless accent. She is complaining about the price of a bag of bread rolls on her bill at the counter of a corner shop.

While she is doing this, her overweight, pug nosed, monstrous progeny is destroying a stand of toys. Her own mother, with skin like a badly damaged leather handbag and dressed in a matching pastel green tracksuit, is smoking a cigarette.

Multiply this by thousands and you begin to understand the horror that is the knackers. I saw mulleted, betrack-suited, obese 8 year olds abusing total strangers in the street. A family of knackers with two pre-school aged children, drinking, swearing, and laughing manically at the back of a bus. I was overwhelmed by the chatter of a half dozen knacker-juniors chatting obnoxiously and unceasingly in their horrid rendering of English in the middle of a crowded internet café. I unknowingly ordered food from one of the knacker snack bars, and was rewarded with the most inedible rendition of greasy spoon fare I have ever encountered.

Dublin was not without it’s charms, but certainly it possesses one of the most loathsome underclasses in the civilised world. It almost makes you understand why the Irish were so persecuted for such a long time, if it weren’t really the Irish that were persecuted, but some forbears to the present day knackers. And if that sounds shocking to you, don’t get up on that high horse until you’ve experienced the horror for yourself. Or better yet, just don’t.

Excuse me while I vent my spleen at the imaginary museum director in my readership:

• Don’t tell me what to do with my camera unless it is “Remove your camera from the hole you just created in that painting”. If I pay you a goodly sum of my hard earned cash, I expect to be allowed to photograph to my hearts content. No flash, fine. But don’t give me that crap about preserving the artworks if I’m standing within a reasonable distance without using a flash.
• Try some common sense. If you have a huge space where people are queuing up to get into small rooms throughout, it’s my prerogative to see the rooms in reverse order. Any route through which you can enter a building should also work to exit said building. What kind of ludicrous human being employs someone to sit and tell people to go back to the opposite side of a building because some fool divined that only one door could function as an exit?
• Don’t force my route through your overpriced, kitschy, vomit-inducing gift shop which takes up space more space than the gallery itself. Just why are you selling handbags in the Uffizi? Is there a sudden shortage of crap peddlers in the street markets of Florence?
• If you aren’t displaying your whole collection, then don’t expect me to pay the full contribution. I don’t care if you’re cleaning, restoring or creating new masterpieces, I’m not paying you for simply being in the same building with them — had many contributions from the Blind Society recently?

For the record, the most disappointing visits thus far have been to the ICA - Boston, the Danish Design Centre - Copehagen, and Galleria degli Uffizi - Florence.

The current bane of my existence is the mosquito population of all of Europe. Apparently my blood has become the it thing this summer, with the little blighters following me from Milan to Budapest to sample the most recent arrival of Asian fusion cuisine. I don’t even know when they’re biting me, all I know is my right foot is itching like mad.

If only spiders weren’t as equally detestable. I wonder how much a bag of geckos costs in Hungarian forints?

No, that’s no trouble — I just spent 3 hours in the midday heat with 20 kilo backpack without any sense of where I should be headed. I love that kind of thing. Don’t worry about it — it’s just, well…

Perhaps it’s time we started seeing other people.

1. Trusting your employees to choose appropriate music to play at a volume of their own discretion in the reception/communal kitchen/dining/only area with available power points is a courageous and probably well founded decision. Some may dissagree, but I think that the rewards speak for themselves.
2. Blinking/scrolling/flashing blue lights in a plastic tube make a bold and aesthetically pleasing choice of decoration for the aforementioned area. The disco ball is also tasteful.
3. Bunk bedding allows one half of your guests to see the underside of the mattress above them. I was delighted to see that you pay attention to, and take advantage of, such nuanced channels of communication. Nothing quite says “welcome” like unidentifiable liquid stains.
4. A big sign saying “NO REFUNDS — sorry for any inconvenience” may be too subtle a message. Especially when that sign is the first thing your guests will see on entering the premises.
5. Posters, paint smears and adult hand prints in primary colours not only decorate your walls, but also cover up any deterioration and unrepairable damage to your building — very successfully.
6. The bag of bread, paint-buckets full of Fruit Topping & What, not butter! and unflavoured bran cereal has equalled if not far exceeded the included breakfast I have been privy to at other supposed “hostels”. That must have cost you at least four pounds a week to put on. What beneficence!
7. A ratio of 1 toilet to 30 people makes perfect sense to me. As does the lack of power points in the dorms.
8. It is great to hear you are an equal opportunity employer. It’s laughs all round when you have two non-native English speakers trying to work out their problems. “She becomes boss in few minutes…” “If you have books for 6 nights” — so professional and constructive towards conflict resolution.
9. Organisational charts which depict a stuffed animal as the supervisor of your organisation, completely allay my fears that this has all been an elaborate candid camera style set-up.

Thanks for the memories.