In the snug of the pub, he’s free from the glare of the big wide world – and perhaps that’s the reason he has remained on the “small rock in the North Atlantic” on which he was born, married to a girl he first asked out in 1976. U2 in 1979: from left, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr., David Evans (aka “the Edge”) and Bono. Bono is effortlessly charming, smiling for the camera with no indication that it’s possibly the millionth time he’s been asked. Normally he can move around his neighbourhood with ease, although this time our meander down the hill to Finnegan’s is interrupted by a fan requesting a selfie. Two years later I’m back to celebrate the release of Bono’s literary debut, his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. (“Who was that nice man in the beanie?” they asked the next morning.) We, the dregs, lingered until closing time, solving the world’s woes to our inebriated satisfaction. There, we built up a salt ‘n’ vinegar crisp mountain: 30 empty packets, counted out painstakingly by Bono and my husband between pints.Īt some point, our bored kids had to be rescued and dropped back to our hotel by the ever-responsible U2 guitarist Edge and his wife. The last time I was here, before the pandemic, lunch for eight around his lengthy dining table (it could comfortably fit a UN delegation), overlooking his tousled garden and the grey-green sea of Killiney Bay, morphed into an all-day conversational orgy at Finnegan’s. Sundays chez Bono are open-house and not for the faint-hearted. “How did you know? It’s my favourite,” enthuses the black-jeaned, rose-tinted-spectacled icon, whizzing me off to admire another recent acquisition, a portrait of the poet Seamus Heaney by Colin Davidson, before we set off for a late-afternoon Guinness at his local pub, Finnegan’s. I arrive at the front door of Bono’s art-filled house in Dalkey, south of Dublin, the city where we first met as teenagers, brandishing a gift: a first edition of The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s dissident Stalin-era satire about the Devil trailing fire and chaos through Moscow.
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