Category: dispatches

Trying to clean the room and failing. Drawer by stuffed drawer, box by shoved-under-bed box, beaten back in each skirmish.

Beforehand the room had a precarious equilibrium, dusty fullness, every nook having been gradually filled past full, things balanced, stacked, compressed and wedged away over years, a slow accumulating, the residues of different periods of me. Fadó fadó here I was a child in a bunk bed, then a teen in a cave built from posters and drawings, later arriving at and gathering speed into adulting and never quite coming to terms with it, with being me or being at all. Such a strange thing, to be a thing.

Every strand of stuff I pull at releases a new plume of disorder. I wade into a treacle of material memory.

Insurance and NCT letters, faded receipts, letters and postcards from friends and loves. I aim to go through a morsel each day.

Some nights I push aside a heap on the duvet to reach the solace of bed. 1 am probably, maybe as deep as 2. The small quiet hours where poetry and curious low tides that leave things uncovered on the sand come from. Where does the night go? Drips down to dawn.

Perhaps it is a comfort, to lie under a cairn like this. Half a dozen pairs of swimming goggles. Cycling shorts with holes on the hips from crashes. Bits of helmets, shoe cleat bolts. Rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film. Oh shit how will I ever get through all of it? Bags of screws, bits of broken cameras, lenses with stuck shutters or with guts hanging out. Envelopes with my name on them and nothing inside. Notebooks of unfinished sentences, unanswered questions, tangents and trails. Officious letters reminding me how awful I am at the systems of living in systems. Dead watches, torn straps, safety pins, scraps of paper. Batteries and coins and books and books and books. So many unread. My tendency to shove the ones I’ve travelled further out of view.

Two tiny plastic snow-globes of the Taj Mahal that kids sold me on that business trip to New Delhi. They trailed us full of eager gestures, brandishing trinkets, marking us as rich foreigners.

Bottles and cups and medals and tickets and boarding passes and nails and screws and shoelaces and thickets of cables and creams and toothbrushes and florescent golf balls and two baseballs with writing on them- indecipherable. Not mine. Brother’s.

Shaving blades. A shirt that I’d refused to wear again because of a memory, stuffed into a plastic box with no lid. Two packs of out-of-date condoms. Camping gear. Four gas cannisters, all used but none emptied. Expired survival meals. A broken typewriter, a broken Gameboy, broken watches, a whole graveyard of broken cameras. Blue and red boxing gloves. Heart rate monitor straps. A set of postcards so neatly written that they draw tears before they can be put back down. Anxious letters from someone to a brother from two decades ago. Two stopwatches and two whistles. How it all flies by. In between the bank statements and marketing junk and delivery invoices, the river of everything.

Each day I aim to go through a morsel but it feels like fighting an Atlantic tide, thrashing against the unperturbed waves.

A little stack of letters that crossed an ocean and sparkle and glimmer with heart and the holding on to that.

Here’s how we go back over our lives of accumulation, and here’s the stuff from which we’ve erected who we are. I think about the difference between getting, having, and having had.

Through heaps of detritus, I divide the artefacts, aspiring to two pure categories of yay and nay, but inventing labels as I go. Good, not good, don’t know, dump, keep, unsure, dump, keep, good, good, crap, nope, unsure, uncertain, maybe, confounded, need a break, what even is this? From a need for clear binaries come hello-ing more options, various levels of unsureness. Each time after a few ticks of the clock the question “have I done enough for now?”

Assemblies of things I do not know what to do with survey me from somewhere between nostalgia, possible-future-use, how icky it feels to put them to landfill, and the low level need for a clearing in the woods that set this whole thing off. I’m not even sure but perhaps it will feel like an escape from a trappedness, a smotheredness squashedness narrowness compressedness. Caught in a purgatory flapping in the wind of various energies, making fitful efforts to move and clarify, but so randomly that the average from afar is a wobbling kind of silly stillness.

I cannot win, but am slowly shrinking some mounds while cycling many pieces of interest back into boxes and shelves for another time, another discussion. it is getting a fraction neater. Why do I need three bottle openers? Is this bulb ever going to be used? Is it wrong to dump unbroken objects?

I remember helping Jackie clearing out the attic of Nanny’s house, the tiny cottage in Mullaghglass within earshot of the sea’s rumblings. Its stout stony walls had raised two generations but how little now there was left, only vague scraps, nothing worth money. It was good to find no material treasure, good to have only memories, to remember that I am partly made from those ocean sounds and the fuchsia hedges and the many scramblings down and up the grassy cliffsides in search of adventure.

I think of spare contemporary homes, chic modern minimal restrained grey clean, and the landfill needed to curate a path to hallowed hollows, all the once sought-after things binned in favour of the space of their absence, the habitats cleared to make the businesses to make the things that will never be used and be stored away until still in their packaging sent to a mountain of waste.

Is it a moral virtue to use what you buy? I imagine an evening cooking a fine dinner slowly, then chucking it into the bin without eating it, and going to bed hungry instead. Why is this so unjust?

I give up again. Little victories. Our domestic spaces and trailing traces. Our materiality, the fill and crumble of our bodies and the river of stuff that we buy.

A big part of art for me is noticing and reflecting in a less than instrumental way. Listening to the world, letting it dent and imprint, and then asserting something back into it, something that you can’t articulate at all clearly. And this is all tied to honesty. And honesty seems to contain the holding of as many details as possible, witnessing them in a oneness, having them speak in a way through you, skirting around the contradictions. Maybe.

Perhaps I can keep on tidying my room now, the room of me, the physical space but more truthfully the scaffolding of memories and beliefs, desires, principles, urges, wishes that I inhabit as my roving interior.

I feel sometimes that I should pray, not to whatever gods may or may not be, but to the absurd speeding cosmos that refuses to be reduced to an understood entity. Sentences directed not to any other but towards the idea of everything, and some untouchable oneness that might move within it. To accept the clutter and the weight of memory while reaching beyond it, to tidy while knowing about entropy, the dance of order and disorder, to keep returning to the wild world.

From the front pocket of a backpack I fish out a decrepit fossil of a banana skin.

There’s an elephant in the room. Isn’t there always?. Hiding quietly behind a narrow strip of curtain folds. It’s this morning and I answer the phone to my Aunt and a minute later we’re arguing. Somebody mentioned politics. I don’t think the ‘green wave’ of last week’s election exists really except as a talking point for the returned status quo of FF and FG. Two arms of the one corpus. Nothing radical has happened. Oh dear. I’ve opened the lid and suddenly we are all going down a dodgy theme park slide.*

“They don’t live in the real world.” That’s what the woman in the cafe said the day after the voting. In small towns these are public venues. The smaller the town, the more public its venues? There, a theorem. Strike it down. She’s talking about the Greens of course. I want to ask her what ‘real’ world she refers to; the one we are choking and burning and carving up, if you listen to the people who count things for a living, or the one where lazy young folk are determined to hush with force anyone who speaks out against their lazy lookatme agenda, and some hoody is breaking into your house while you are on the phone to Joe Duffy about the councillor that should never have given that guy planning permission? How the hell are we to afford electric cars?

Now I’m back on the phone and the slide is picking up speed. There’s a vegan elephant in the room driving up demand for useless shite. Why am I suddenly mad? Why can I not soak it up and not react, let it accumulate as pure signal to be meta-versed about later on?

Well, what do you do about it then? You have a car, right? you eat meat, don’t you? You have to look at your own life first before telling others how to live theirs.

Ireland is only tiny; what we do has basically no effect. The elephant in the east is the real beast. Every village factoried out and a coal plant firing up every five minutes.

How do we get to work then? How are we expected to live?

Now I have a mushmash in my brain, a merging of oilsmoke into a pumping chimera: my parents, my aunt, the woman in the cafe, Mid-West and Galway Bay fm morning radio callers, an army of replies to Journal articles, and then the fog of fatalism- a scrawny black tomcat that shows up every so often and then is suddenly a full time pet that you’re going to have to neuter before he stinks out the place.

Well, how will we get to work if they ban cars, or tax the crap out of them? You commute yourself! Do you cycle to work every day? Ban farming? Where will people work? Are they your only ideas? Ban this, ban that, tax and more tax? It’s one thing to regulate landlords but what responsibilities do tenants have? They can wreck the place and just move out. How can you raise children on a vegan diet? It’s easy for those ‘influencers’ to jump on a fad and pay someone to do up a diet and afford everything.

Is it even work? What you do- work? What time do you get up at?

Farming in Ireland was always low-impact. Farmers actually care about the land. They’re more carbon efficient than those big countries: we should be making more beef, not less. We have high standards. Grass fed. Easy for people in cities to just ignore it and buy buy buy from their Tescos or Lidls, imported chicken wrapped in plastic. Good with avodacos or piled into lunchboxes for post-gym snacks (need that summer tone #bodygoals) A generation ago, there were no mountains of nappies tied inside plastic bags. People kept their own hens. The younger generation are buying all of this junk. Now they’re blaming us?

Why shouldn’t we build houses to live in? Where else are we supposed to live? Who gets to live in houses then? Rich people? How are they rich? Selling us the junk that we don’t need in the first place?

If you’re not happy with how people vote go out and set up your own party. If you want change go out and make it happen, otherwise you’re the same as everyone else anyway. Don’t be just here complaining about it.

Tax, tax, tax. They’ll tax the air we breathe. The greens will only go after people in the country with tax after tax and rule after rule. Remember the last time they were in power? People have short memories.

You’re a smart person- go and write about it; if you feel strongly about it, write about it, don’t just sit there. Write it out and get people to read it and get them to listen that way.

Isn’t it easy for you, for you to criticise, living at home of your parents; you don’t have to pay for kids, couldn’t afford to build a house anyway so it’s just sour grapes, classic case of begrudgery.

Is it even a real job? Is it in the real world? Are you in it?

I watch the chimera and elephant hanging out, sniffing, getting to know each other. The chimera goes behind the other curtain. Together they almost touch, blocking out 99.999% of sunlight from the window. Or was it a streetlight? Hardly the moon.

I pitched a tent on Black Head again, on Sunday night at 10pm after eating in Monks. Before that I got half lost following Google Maps to the Burren National Park. The 3G went awol for a bit and it jumped from 2 km away to 17 km away though I didn’t change roads. Ah fuck. Fuck you technology. But I saw a sign for Cahercommaun stone fort and walked up there and sat in the middle inside the 3 thirteen-hundred year old stone circles on the grass over the cliff edge with bees in the flowers. Nobody else around. I record it on my smartphone. Then I stopped at Parknabinnia wedge tomb and saw a broken “Beware of the Bull” sign behind the wall. Then swinging down towards Corofin and back up I actually made the National Park and walked a fair way though it was already late.

I pitched a tent on Black Head with the lights of Connemara twinkling across the bay, and I planned to get up real early- real as the real world where real people do get up on Monday mornings. But I slept fitfully in the bag and was slow to wake out of it. It rained on and off, and the sea just across the road was loud and a wind buffeted the flysheet. I took the whole tent down in record time though. A big fat navy cloud was rolling in from above the Aran islands. I got to the car just as heavy drops began to pour. Plink plink plonk.

I walked a section of cliffy shore then went on to Doolin for breakfast. Drove down and up and down and up. Where to park? Where to eat? The architecture is odd. It feels like it should be a quaint village around a cluster of squat old buildings but it has been such a roaring success it’s mostly a fragmented sprawl of bulky boomtime guesthouses and rent-me rent-me living with signposts everywhere. Where is its centre? Car parks with ‘customers only’ signs? A strip near a junction that has a hotel/bar/cafe in a strip? Some of the fat guesthouses are abandos, boombust victims, fenced off, unfinished. Here be raw spoils of progress and purity. We sacrifice one myth for another. We can stay and make a living but only by distorting things. Build up a tourist town around a mythical old village. And what pure history is buried in the ground anyways? Who wants to go back to Ireland in the fifties? Go away out of that.

I eat breakfast in the Doolin Cafe. I manage to avoid the full Irish but I know I need plenty of calories. Protein. Proteeeen. I go for salmon and eggs even though I don’t like the whole fish farm market.

The curtains shuffle: the chimera is recording me on a smartphone, livestreaming my salmon-eating hypocrisy, giggling. The elephant can’t be seen now for coal smoke but he seems to be growing bigger- swelling.

Take me back to Doolin then off up towards the Moher cliffs. I drive to the top first. A parking warden walks down to tell me I can’t leave the car there. I know I know. I saw the signs. I’m just leaving a bike locked to this post for a few hours. Grand grand grand. I give an Englishman who was over to surf in Lahinch a lift back down the hill. He’s glad to escape the shower- perfect timing. Finally I park again and start walking up towards the main event; three hundred and twenty vertical metres of cliff. There, there, for a while, I find a giddy rambling tune to follow, a path worn into but not dictatoring the shore, the sea roaring and breathing just below, right there, epic and rolling an infinite weave, texture and flow and scale. It ignores you; mucks with your mental map legend. I stop to take photographs and try to be less of me and more of open sensation.

I pass and then get passed by a couple of girls every so often as we stop at different spots. Stop go stop go. It rains and stops and rains and stops. Jacket on, jacket off. Jacket on, jacket off. Sweat, rain. At some stage we chat for a few minutes. The path eventually pitches up towards the high epicentre where the buses are all pulled up. Everyone is taking pictures of the edge or off the edge. I see me seeing other guys with tripods and them seeing me back and all of our gazes running into each other like the waves at the base of the cliffs. A couple is doing a full-on shoot. Looks like an American-style engagement thingy. I wonder what Lightroom colour grading they’ll use? What white balance and effects? Celebrate or denigrate? Every so often, on a year-to-year scale, someone plunges off these heights. Self inflicted or selfie inflicted. That a man may be free to choose. Why are we drawn to lofty heights? There are plaques in these places.

A harpist and a fiddler are playing by the main path from the bus park to the cliff edges. The tower is being repaired, cloaked with rattling scaffolding. I can’t hear the music or waves or rattle though; I’m in the warm busy visitor centre under the sloping glass, trying to let sweat and rain dry and get some calories in from expensive tea and muffin and crisps. The usual. Muffled piped music. “Here she comes again…”, Muffled conversation. The smell of acidic surface cleaner. Kills 99.999999% of all known germs dead. That and the muffin and crisp smell. “Please review us on TripAdvisor.” Unless you’re a crank. Oh fuck, I’m a crank. One said she would look me up on Instagram. I cycle down. Some wheeeeeeee, but there’s too much weight on my back- big heavy tripod and big heavy lock and big heavy camera all stuffed into or strapped to the backpack.

Later I look up the names of birds that you can see on Moher. There were thousands of them. It’s nesting season. I heard a woman at the edge ask “what kind of birds are they?” and after a pause her man answers with “They’re seagulls”. I have to look them up; I can never seem to get the names to stick. Guillemots with their white spectacles. Razorbills. Kittiwake gulls. Stomach acid-spitting flying milkbottle fulmars. Choughs though I think I only saw ravens. Maybe a peregrine falcon but I think I would have noticed those. Puffins! Rock Pipits. I could hear skylarks. I wonder how many eggs are down on those cliffs each year. Some of them are self cleaning. Cliff eggs are designed to not roll. Are all eggs like that? Maybe I’ve seen too many chicken eggs.

Now I’m back, to the swish of curtains and badly hid beasts and my hypocrisy and all those questions lined up, to defend and justify and establish boundaries and borders while my discomfortable tomcat of fatalism curls up round my head. More arguments wherever you look. Debate. Debait. About how being kind to refugees is an open invitation to millions more. About the little man being punished while the rich man soaks up sun. About insurance fraud and the degeneracy and moral poverty of today’s generations. About a politician herself falling off a swing, and having the sheer nerve to sue and later the further gall to go on morning radio and defend herself even after the internet was all up in a heap hounding out the details: the picture from the 10km a few days after, the music festival. Trial by mass media. Like and share. The joy of getting a kick in during a melee. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it sometimes? I suppose you’re a saint then? And what have you ever done to actually save the planet? And what difference did it actually make? You didn’t buy a plastic bottle or a tin of tuna? That’s it?

There’s plenty of space on the slide. It flows like sandpaper and broken glass. Got any interesting questions?

*My Aunt and parents are amazing people; this piece isn't fair to them; it is an attempt though to be honest to my own internals. Sometimes I feel like I have a committee of parodies running sessions in my brain.

[image: Corrib river bank near NUI Galway on Ektar 120 via Hasselblad at 80mm; I expect this area will be re-purposed as per the planning permisison notice on the path, to give way to more student housing and carpark, and a "Dedicated Biodiversity Enhancement Area". You'll be grand, Nature, relax; we just need to fire a bike lane through here. ]

A morning run can be better in theory than in practice. Well, every theory can be better than its practice, but yeah, morning runs. It’s already ‘too’ late when I start so I can’t faff along for 15km of continuous birdsong, so instead I decide to try a few vague rough-road 500m efforts. Slow down the peninsula and quicker back up. Less than pain but at least some pant. Repeat * 5. Flat out for the last. I struggle to rouse the legs and a stomach grumbles about breaking its night of fast.

On the first lap there are shiny black slugs in one spot near an expensive lakeview house built in a European money vernacular. They, the slugs, are down between the grass at the edge and the grass in the middle. I aim to remember to keep my feet away. Maybe it’s some reproduction ritual, snail chasing snail, franticness of nature slo-mo pace. I wonder about their chances and count the cars in houses in the short stretch as I run: 1 + 4 + 2. I can do this. Seven. Comings and goings. Holiday homes. They, the slugs, might be safe enough, snug as bugs, meandering along the deathy tyre-lane parts of road. Maybe they can eventually evolve to avoid roads. Or just not exist. Not existing is less of a solution though.

May is full gas gunning along now, hawthorns and their mayflowers already peaked, gulls, terns and geese squawking, squabbling, and wheeling round their Creeve nesting site, low clouds over bright lake, stubs of islands all green and morning mayfly boats out. First dates, couple goals, eggs eggs eggs, edge to edge leaf, insects being snaffled up on every surface- quivering web of spider, rising gulp of trout, jinking swoop of swallow. We don’t eat them ourselves much but perched up on the top of the food chain we are burning other links below, or paving over them with concrete or mounds of empty plastic packaging. Sorry mate, didn’t see you there.

Oh if I could get up earlier, chop an hour off, jolt out of bed like electric spark, have the grog immediately clear, then maybe maybe. The day might not have flown away because I went ahead with the run and then was too tired and hungry to be hungry for effort. The non-morning-person is condemned to forever chasing the remnants of risen days with lateriserguilt.

Election selection tomorrow. A strange combination of the most local authorities and the most global. Area councillors to hassle over planning permission and MEPs to send off to the grand EU experiment, whatever it is. I’ve never been to Brussels, have I? Creaky at the edges with the Brexit ship waiting to sail and yet stuck in the docks and having to take part in the election anyways. Barrage of Farage and May’s deal still on the dodgy record player. “Never could be any other way. Never could be any other way. Never could be any other way…” Backwards they say it sounds like a stiff upper lip doing a sermon about fighting on beaches.

My legs are still riddled with a medley of midge bites that I like to humblebrag about, or stumblebrag or lookatme-brag, fishing for likes or something. Or a social expression, something we are drawn to, driven to. Here, look at my fine injury and comment. They itch like a bitch and I scraped a few pieces of skin enough to scab. My willpower is too weak to resist. You would think that nature would let itches lose their effect after a few hours? Or maybe scratching the skin till it bleeds is actually the optimal solution. Maybe scratching is actually a social signal, that makes it hard to hide a dodgy condition from others?

Back on the morning run, which already seems like a long time ago, things don’t end well for the slugs. On interval 4, I hear the rattle of wheels on cattle-grid behind me, then the postman in his van passes. After, I can see one slug squashed into goo. Sorry, mate. And on the last effort, where I push the 500m down to 1:28, a gold Landcruiser is trying to reverse a trailer into the big Euronacular house (Christ, wouldn’t you love if it was yours?). All the slugs are gone. Ooh I should have stopped to pluck them up and drop them into the grass. Now they are all dead. May is murder.

I stick the Hasselblad in one of the pannier bags mounted on the old blue Giant racer, and the tripod in the other. Then I head off a bit aimlessly. Left back the Glann road towards the hill of Doon or the High Road loop, or right to Oughterard? Right. Now, South towards Galway city or North towards Maam Cross and wild open Connemara? South. Now, straight on or left towards Aughnanure Castle and the maze of back roads. Left- shelter, no cars, no hurry.

An hour and some change later I will come back the same way in icy rain, trying to ignore a pair of freezing wet feet. Ah, welcome back, oh feeling of winter soaking and wrong shoe choice.

But for now, the roads are still dry, and the high leafless hedgerows hide me from the wind. Few cars. Country houses line the way, all facing the road, from a range of eras, materials, no unified design. 50s cottage-style with the two big front rooms, tiny bathroom and kitchen. 70s bungalow with upgraded double glazing. 80s open style with something USA. The odd classical flourish or non-rectangular edge. A stamp of posh, a cornice of pretension, a doric capital, perchance an ionic. Dormers from the oversized noughties. Not so much elegance. Neither showy nor restrained, more expressions of changing norms. Function, material, landscaping, regulation – window sizes, alignment, road facing, plot positioning. Not fully planned but a game of PLANNING PERMISSION. PLANNING PERMISSION is one of the pillars of IRISH POLITICS. This is how it rolls. The rules change the houses change. Septic tanks, one-off housing, maintaining what exactly- the countrysideness of the countryside?

I stop at any pier I find and take a long exposure photo in the cold. At Knockferry a sheepdog is sniffing around the old tyres used as boat buffers. It runs up. You have to be careful reading dogs, and look for their body language- friendly or foey? Some are quiet, defensive, head back, tail down, ears tucked in. Easier if they snarl or bark they might just stare, steady themselves. This dog is relaxed, full of beans, jumping, delighted with a pat on the head, eager for an ear-scratch. I figure it’s a HE. Yup, a HE will mark like that, cock the leg up, sniff, cock, run, sniff, cock.

Now, there is an insight on the spin, and it is my new sheepdog companion that digs it out. On they way to the pier, along by the line of road-facing houses, I see few signs of life, and everything is calm, secure, domestic, organic as the cold of this hibernation season.

Now, Sheepdog sprints and darts and races alongside me and in front and then behind and then in front again. I almost crash into him. At every house he darts up to the gate, cocks the leg, sniff sniff sniff, cock, dart, sniff.

And at every house, I think every single house until I worry he is lost and will follow me home but then suddenly he disappears, there is another dog going nutso on the other side of the wall, running out the drive, barking and jumping and positively enraged. Sheepdog darts, cocks, sniffs, they appear, bark, give chase, then give up- next house.

So if I have no dog I will not see but peace. I will not witness any barking or confrontation. I cannot see what it would be like for ME+DOG when it is just ME. And I cannot know what the world is like for so many OTHER scenarios, even if it is the very same houses that I pass. I am always in the scene that I am in, and the scene as I am in it, depends on the I. Yet I must measure all on how it reacts to me. What once gave comfort might change so fast.

Soon I will find the glove that I dropped, and then the skies will open, and I will find I don’t have the form to cycle hard into the cold gale, so aim for patience and dream of a hot shower and food and try not to slow the internal complaining about shoe choice.