Mucky June weather and the bottom fallen out of the stretch in May but this, this Saturday evening in the little park hidden away in a west city estate, is aglow with generous light. It throws muddy shadows from bikes as they swing round the circuit, on the flush summer grass, on the country flags…
Sunday September 16th, 2018. Last race in the season for the club. Summer gone south with the swallows. I saw one, maybe the last, swooping out beyond the water tower. Riders arrive in ones and twos. There’s hesitation: run it out and back like a normal league race? More riders arrive. Nope, stick with the…
Toto pulling at the leash to gobble slices of white pan tossed along Main Street by a Bread-Exit delivery. A rowdy division of suffragettes clashing with a soldier. Sean Clancy’s MC mic getting scrambled with music from a raucous Rapunzel parody. A Men’s Shed rocket scattering smoke in the biting raw breeze. Numb thumbs struggling…
It’s early January, and 2018 is still shiny and new and cold, and I pull in 5 miles from Clifden to get a photo of some mounds of gravel that have been piled up by the N59. I’m hoping to get something that is Connemara but not cliché, something that I can’t visualise, something I’m…
The Dark Half. If you were to cut a year down the middle, right through the belly, it would make sense (in the northern hemisphere at least), to choose the time of Halloween. This is when Daylight Savings Time is cut from the clocks and autumn cedes to winter. It’s a transition from light to…
Dull, damp, October. A pheasant in the middle of the road. I always have the wrong lens, and he flies off before I can find another. The road ends, a track begins. Fading signposts point out the Western Way. A gaggle of houses perched over the Corrib. Honeysuckle. Leaves on the ground turning to sodden…
Is it here yet? We are plugged into radio, tv, boards.ie, facebook, twitter. RED warning. refresh, refresh, refresh. Cork’s getting a hammering. 169 km/h way down at Fastnet Rock. Waterford. Tipperary. The eye is tracking up the west coast. Is this it? Now? Lough Corrib is churning. It’s raining full pelt. Up in the high…
September. Wave stripping wind. A drive back to Cleggan. Missed the early ferry. Was stuck behind buses thought about overtaking, but nope, pulled the plug on aiming for the early ferry and had coffee in Clifden. Made ferry 2. Bang, bang, bang into the waves once it left the harbour.
Windmills on the hills slowly rotate in the August breeze. John Sullivan, eighty-plus, with a healthy shock of hair, hops onto the stuttering old Massey Ferguson, his back injured and twisted from years of hard work on the land. But he is still nimble, like the tractor; chipped and scraped, scarred and weathered, but with…
Last of May, 2017. One camera, one roll of film, one day: get objective on the reality of being me, here, now, today Canon F1n, Fuji 200 35mm film. Mostly on 35mm f2 and 50mm f1.4 lenses, with 1 shot on a 135mm f2.5 (FL lens from the 1960s).
Summer was a long haul of slosh and soakings, and then finally in Autumn dry stretches fuse into a few weeks of easy goings and comings, crunch of leaf underfoot, mudless soles, no winds worth their leaning into. Come November 1st, and the temperature strays above 15 Celsius. That trip to the Maamturks was long…
It’s a little bit of dark, a little bit of chaos, a lot of imagination, and a stick to shake at the arriving winter. Dwell in the dark, take refuge in the symbols, there is energy and density in the bulbous, the twisted, the animal, and the shadow. The first set of black and white…
It is the last race of the road season for me, but I don’t know it. I don’t know it until halfway through stage 2 when the bunch is going down a straight descent into Dungarvin. A rider comes down somewhere in front on the left, and a dominoes game of falling cyclists begins. Given…