NoBo

For a good while now, Pearse Station, in the centre of Dublin, has had this jazzy integrated café on the platform.

"Which platform?", I hear you ask. Why the South Bound platform of course. Isn't that where all the quality travel from and it's not called SoBo for nothing.

Now, there are lots of myths about the DART. There is even supposed to be a DART accent. Quite how that could be is very hard to understand when you look at the variety of ABCDE areas through which that train passes. Of course, the quality live on the Southside and it is to them that the DART accent refers. Some of them might be jumped up quality, but quality nonethless for the purpose of this exercise.

This DART accent corresponds to what in my day was the Mount Murrion accent. This was a sort of neutralised transatlantic accent which signified that you at least, and perhaps even your people, were neither up from the country nor residents of the inner city.

So the SoBo café went with the accent, so to speak. And those freaky Northsiders could always risk missing their train if they stopped for a cup of coffee, as a northbound DART could have come and gone in the time it took you to negotiate the underground passage from southbound to northbound platform.

Now, at last, there is an end to this discriminatory foolishness. The northbound platform has acquired a Mocha Bar and can confidently cock a snoot at it's SoBo rival. So there.