A few years back when I found myself – sorry, made myself – unemployed in Dublin at the height of the recession, I found myself with a lot of time to fill and very little money to spend. So to keep myself busy, I embarked on a journey of exploration of the city, where I visited places of cultural and historical interest and tried new things, none of which cost very much, and blogged about them in a series rather romantically titled “Dates with Dublin”. (I was single at the time, and I found that the experience of hanging out in museums with dead people was frequently surpassing some of my  romantic encounters, but enough about that.)

Around that time, in keeping with the theme of “things I always meant to do but never really got around to”, I booked myself into the Irish Blood Transfusion Clinic to give my first donation.

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