Wednesday
03Feb2010
Deck shoes
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 11:00PM Deck Shoes
We might be in the same boat but I wouldn't want to be in your shoes.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 11:00PM Monday
18Jan2010
Folly That
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 10:25AM Folly That
pomppomppomplololalaa troubadours or maurading matadors we folly the lotharios giggling on rioja through the streets behind the Ramblas. Masquerading about in capes like zoro's with their moustachios armed with badges and rosettas. They serenade themselves into the Heladería and order gorgonzola and pistachios ice-cream. So we folly suit and it is unexpectedly good.
Sunday
17Jan2010
Handsome and Jetsam
Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 10:57PM Handsome and Jetsam
Are you familiar with these two terrible fellows at all? Handsome and Jetsam. And those other right characters Flotsam and Winsome. The tides and eddies of winter lingering on street corners hands dug into pockets. I wish the snow would come back.
Before the thaw abandon car to a halt and race sliding down a lane cheering at the spectacle. It seems imperative to be alive for ever.
Waiting for the snow to come back. Strip down the bed for line-fresh linen. Peeling away the onions of extra eiderdowns and heavy woven throws feather leaden cushions. Fling open the windows to let the middle of the night in and suddenly it doesn't seem important to put them back. Stowed instead sure won't there be more snow next year. And right enough when I wake there are seagulls in the air.
Tuesday
05Jan2010
Stopping Time
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 11:15PM Stopping Time
2010 rushes up the beach. Here, teetering at the edge I am on the pebbles before the tide or the sun. I make time stop by pretending to think about nothing.
The seaweed is frozen. Hands of leather shards wave at me. Piped in white icing like driving gloves.
Select shells. That one, no that one, something to mark the day. A habit. Like when we were small sneaking salty treasure into pockets. Oh for goodness sake put them down, what do you want those for?
A girl races towards me brandishing a fist of keys. A hole is discovered in my jacket. Laugh, then look back silently at the rapidly gaining tide. A lucky start to the year. I'll have to get some more shells. They should have snipped holes in our shorts pockets, we could have stuffed them with shells to our hearts content.
I'm thinking about everything and the tide is high. Time starts again.
Friday
25Dec2009
Slim Slow Slider
Friday, December 25, 2009 at 10:47PM Slim Slow Slider
With a hangover to beat the band oompapahoomp and a tartan ribbon in my pony tail I head out for the christmas sprint along my favourite run in the world. Better even than a Funchal promenade or timing yourself to the church door in Vigo. Better still than Freemantles railway tracks or whooshing past the rushes to Ladys Mile in Limassol. There isnt a sinner about except for the cows and four and twenty blackbirds. Good gravy, a handsome Billy Goat!* Across the road a clatter of Wilhemena goats totter about in their high heeled hoofs hoping to catch his eye. Even a snail takes advantage of the quiet and is marching across the road. I give him a hand and pop him on the verge. As I run off it occurs to me that I didn't ask which way he was heading and I might have just put him back to his point of departure.
My parents grew up streets away from each other in Belfast. They met when they were fourteen. From her bedroom window she'd watch him slide down the middle of her street on his way to the dance. She wasnt allowed to go to the Plaza or slip about in the snow under street lamps. She must have made it to the dance eventually because we're all here. Our goose is standing when I get back, is he done? Your goose is as good as mine. Time for a hair of the goat that nipped me.
*Erratum: Sources have since revealed that our Billy Goat is in fact a Jacobs Sheep. May as well be hung for a sheep as a goat. Townies eh.
Wednesday
23Dec2009
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 6:43PM Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
We were in Bethlehem on Christmas eve. Before things got tricky with Israel and the lines stopped called at Haifa and Ashdod. It was the day it was handed back to Palestinian jurisdiction. Israeli troops had pulled out three days prior and there was riotous celebration and menace in the air. Everyone was carrying a cocked gun in their sock. Wikipedia tells me it was 1995. I was in awe of The Croatian at the time. We were trapped in a road block racing for the ship and came perilously close to missing it. He sat grim-faced the whole way to the gangway then fumed to the dining room doing up his bow tie. I sat on the bunk counting the cock-roaches on the deck head and thought that the realignment of international borders was hardly my fault.
Tuesday
15Dec2009
This Years Cahier
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 2:08PM This Years Cahier
Making ready the new Moleskine, a thoroughly satisfying annual task. The ceremony demands a Good Pen and a hopeful heart. Farewell constant companion of 2009. I'll pop you on the shelf now with the others, your leaves sigh, rest your spine. Not without sadness, it's been quite the year and we are both scarred with the scribbles and scores of the journey. If journalism is the first stage of history, the yearly quire is the first stop of memory.
My Fathers apprentice notebooks fascinated as a child. Oversized stern-backed exercises in engineering. Green and pink ruled feint and margin in imperial proportion. Stiff pages, before they learned how to make them thin and shiny, densely hatched with physics. Calculations and mysterious symbols in his neat light pen. They were incomprehensible and beautiful and utterly satisfying. After both my Grandfathers died small notebooks were found in their wake. Recipes or random words, repeated again and again in that long elegant scribe men used to have. A little shaky now, journeymen's knuckles gnarled by the float and the plane.
Saturday
12Dec2009
One definition of insanity
Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 11:04PM One definition of insanity
I often reach too quickly for the handle to a door in my parents house that leads from the utility room into the garage and stub my knuckles on the wall. Because neither the handle, door nor indeed garage have been there since about 1986. Like a ghost that appears to walk 18 inches below the level of the new floorboards. Habit, it's a hard one to break right enough.
Saturday
05Dec2009
The Beckoning Silence
Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 11:54AM The Beckoning Silence
We couldn't see the mountain because we were on it. That was in part the problem.
I have an ambition to see the Eiger. From Grindelwald on a wooden deck wrapped in wool with Harrer's White Spider some binoculars and access to good smorgasbord.
Friday
04Dec2009
Road to Cortina
Friday, December 4, 2009 at 10:51PM Road to Cortina
Stare. Blink. Blink. Blink. Italy bitter silent goes past. We drive into the mountains.
Friday
04Dec2009
Form follows function
Friday, December 4, 2009 at 12:19AM Form follows function
I love tug boats. Beasts of things under the water too when you see them out of it. Like icebergs, big pelican-billed icebergs. They churn through the water throwing up a fabulous wake. After I had portholes I'd often wake to a thump, a powerful diesel roar and a pair of oil-skin boots. The Push Here was painted on the other side of my exterior bulkhead. I didn't mind a bit. The first time I pulled into New York the Margaret Moran hauled us up the Hudson. The Hudson tugs are named after gangsters molls. At least that's what's in my head though I don't know why.
Thursday
26Nov2009
Pin Sharp
Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:29PM Pin Sharp
See. I could keep going you know. The old Mju II again. Fixed 35mm, sharp as a die front to back. There's three under the stairs. Where's the point in that.
Thursday
26Nov2009
Bench mark
Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:18PM Bench Mark
I've a fascination for them and quite a collection. All shapes and sizes from around the world. I'm interested in other people's viewpoints.
Thursday
26Nov2009
Take a seat, tarry awhile
Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 11:18AM Take a seat, tarry awhile
Fried green bananas at the Church Street Cafe. A cold Banks and a jaw with the old boys. Jump the reggae bus to Mullins Bay for two fingers of Four Square and the sun downs. The new turtles flip flap for the foam and the moon tides. Reflect that nothing really happened today and nothing will really happen tomorrow. Extraordinary.
Monday
23Nov2009
Party like it was 1999
Monday, November 23, 2009 at 3:00PM Party like it was 1999
Seemingly St Petersburg did this to me. I found the relentless monotonous rhythm utterly fascinating. And it wasn't a stylistic phase either, these images were shot nine years before the port freight train. I completely forgot about them. This time I hunkered stationary.
Monday
23Nov2009
Send three and four pence, we're going to a dance
Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:25PM Send three and four pence, we're going to a dance
St Petersburg still looks like a bad postcard of itself. As though the old off-set printing press is running low on magenta again. Under a cyan sky I always found the port of St Petersburg fascinating and beautiful. The journey from the gangway to interrogation at the port gate should have taken half an hour but always took two. And if a train was trundling across the road at walking pace when you returned you were in trouble. It could be two miles long and there was no way around it. Nothing to do but sit on the kerb and read between the lines. Where have you been, with your ore there I'd quiz. Siberia?
I can't find the engine house or rear carriage on the negatives so I mustn't have photographed them. Reasons unclear. Perhaps I just couldn't see them.
Saturday
21Nov2009
A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner
Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 5:11PM A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner
Granda McAreavey would take us across the road to the Dunville Park. We'd play quoits, aiming a big 10p for chipped painted circles on the tarmac. Then we'd gather up seedy helicopters, dusty wings swirled back to the thin dirt in slow motion. At first we had to be lifted into the basin of the derelict fountain, eventually we could navigate the smooth boundary wall ourselves. I can still feel the round pink acned stone on my bare legs. Pocked by decades of dirty rain. As the Black Staff belched the Victorian folly crumbled. The centre of the fountain was good for a clamber but we were always a little afraid of it. The dark internal pit was lined with black ashes soaked in urine and the scorched iron skeleton reeked. We would perch on a portal each but wiry wee hard men would see us off their tongues too quick for us. The Dunville Park was like much of a Belfast childhood in the seventies. You knew that bad things went on there after dark but you didnt know what.
Friday
20Nov2009
Would you look at that rain
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 1:28AM Would you look at that rain
Says two year old Rosie indignantly. Beautiful, what they pick up. We are so reliant on the Great God Google I go to search for a piece of music by note, like I could just type in a few semi-quavers. Doubtless it will come. Google Sounds. I had a friend who had a fascination for noise and collected sounds like I collected images. We'd hold enthusiastic conversations about depth, tone, colour and resonance and we both knew what we were talking about. He wandered about with a high-fidelity recorder and was forever balancing a mic on things. Listen to this freight train! He'd say. Or regale you with some good rain he found.
I was lonely and angry in Singapore for some reason or other I care not recall. But I like the way the newspaper snapped into focus and I loved the sound of this ridiculous phone though I never heard it ring.
Tuesday
17Nov2009
Do geese see God?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 1:31AM Do geese see God?
Speaking of palindromists, A man, a plan, a canal – Panama!
The Mule presides over Oriana's aft end. The swimming pool is sunk into deck five but when the lock fills again her hull will dwarf him. They'll tether and he'll haul her out. Diesel-faced canal workers dead-eye stare and sneer with smeared chins. Pasajeros frolic bake and peer through opera glasses. Alarms clatter, our armed escort barks and photographers scamper scattering off the lock gates. Taking our turn in the middle look at me look at me with one foot on each America. An automaton blares incomprehensible instructions through the stinking Panamanian haze. Loud hailers spaced on telegraph poles every 50 yards. She sounds like the teacher in Good Grief Charlie Brown.
Tuesday
17Nov2009
Able was I ere I saw Elba
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:16AM Able was I ere I saw Elba
Another Captain I was particularly fond of was rather petit and polite. One of the few who would bestow a morning stroll through the crew mess to see how we are all doing today, here in paradise. Back then it would have been through the fug of the smoking end aft into the morning after of the crew bar. Possibly just missing the last of the casino with their bow-ties askew. There was some salacious story about. It sustained throughout his last trip. An overly tall salon girl from Dublin and a Chiropody Incident. He popped up at a crew party on tween deck which was most confusing for everybody. I enjoyed his farewell speech, they ask me, he said, what I'm going to do with myself when I leave the sea. An old sailor once told me that when you leave the sea you must throw a pair of oars over your shoulder and start walking inland. When someone says 'What are they for?' you can stop there.
I followed Napoleon around. From his garden in Ajaccio which reeked of ancient rosemary and skulked with cats, to his exile on Elba then St Helena off Africa. Didnt they ship him off there in a cask of brandy?