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…
I’m hunched down under a little umbrella, my back against a rock face on the mountainside, and through drumming hail sunlight beams from under a turreted and tendrilled bank of Atlantic cloud. Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and bounce down the rock face. Pile into little lines and bumps and begin to whiten…
Winter still on duty: Drops dusk early Provokes depressions to jostle over the Atlantic And this one brings fierce hail, Stinging along the coast I run For poor shelter under wavebashed rock Scattering sea birds Into jolted gale-hung grace And me, jolted but clumsy, staring at waves, Intruding. Beach and coast at Furbo, January 2018.
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 last ‘proper’ snow here was back in 2010/2011, when things got real cold, as low as -15, and pipes were splitting up and down the country. In Ireland we basically call society off when it goes below -5. Most of us have never seen a snow plough, or snow shoes, or know what snow…
The Promotion Interview room 341 is very small and dark, like a segment cut from a corridor. Harry notices the odd ratio of wall to door to window as he automatically moves towards the one empty chair. An inspector sits opposite behind a small desk, staring down at a screen. He’s thin, suited, with short…
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…
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…
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…
Act Dance Sing is a dance academy in Galway. This year the group got together for their annual summer show ‘Stars on the Rise’ in Leisureland, Salthill
An Arts Festival during ‘The heatwave of 2013’- a few unique weeks of rare sunshine. This is how the rest of the world knows summer. July 19th, 2013.
–Photos of Inchagoill and Lough Corrib— After the long winter and slow-rising spring the green explosion finally happened. The mayfly season on Lough Corrib rolled around again. Birds and fish feast on the short lived flies as they rise to the surface en masse. They are easy pickings, their defence lies in being so numerous…