Funniest thing happened to me this week.
One of my oldest and dearest friends Krista has been visiting London with her lovely cousin Ben and we've had a lovely time visiting Paris and Ireland.
Ben bought with him photo taken about 30 years ago of a cute coastal house in
Dún Laoghaire (Dunleary) that their great-grandfather grew up in. Armed with the old photo, the street name, bucketloads of optimism and exitement and our lovely hire car we set out from Dublin to try and find the old family home.
Apparently Ben had done a similar thing in Scotland a year or two ago with another old anestory home and when he knocked on the door with the photo, the new home owners invited him in to look around. We had high hopes and had no idea how lucky we were about to get.
After a lap of the steet and a few false starts (the rock wall fences were slightly wrong or the coastline didn't math up), we flagged down a local lady pushing a pram who recognised the house in the photo.
She told us that a new owner had not long ago bought the old property and tore down the old house to build a modern new marble and glass mansion. But the big news was that this new owner was actually celebrated hollywood film producer
Jim Sheridan - director of Get Rich and Die Tryin' with rap star 50 Cent, In the Name of the Father, The Boxer with Daniel Day Lewis
and Brothers with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal!
We were very excited that someone famous now lived in Ben and Krista's great-grandfathers home but now very nervous about knocking on the door.
So we found the house, complete with gated security and 8-foot walls, and pressed the buzzer. Jim Sheridan's wife came out in her dressing gown and after a very moving speech by Ben about how we'd travelled from Australia to find the house, she asked us in.
Jim was sitting on the lounge, on his laptop, in the living room with full length glass wall overlooking the water and grunted at us as we gushed apologies at turning up uninvited and thanking him for being so gracious as to let us in.
Mrs Sheridan showed us through the house with luxury private cinema, sauna, guest suites and an infinity rok pool built into the side of the cliff face off their back deck.
The whole experience was very surreal and very exciting. And another funny memory I'll take home with me from this UK experience!
We find the street...
Is this the house? Nope.
A nice local lady gives us directions
Looks a little different but this is the one!
Mrs Sheridan shows us around the new house
What a view
The cousins in font of their great grandfathers old property
They were pretty excited
As was I!
