The High Low Point

A phone call from my old friend Ronan who's over from Canada for a couple of weeks. He's very tied up with family business and has been visiting in Roscommon so this is only the second time we've had a chance to meet. He suggested Killiney Hill and that was fine by me, a chance to climb up out of the shortest day in the year and look over its shoulder. Beautiful evening, full of smoky clouds and rich Turneresque pinks and yellows. 

As we climbed through the woods, our conversation roamed as it always has, touching on everything from Civil War politics, and that often misused word 'revisionist', to the 'kleptocracy' of Dublin's planners, to Ronan's health and the gorgeous vista in front of us (sparked by a bench engraved with the opening lines from The Wake: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs). 


That not-always-so-commodious vicus had also brought us round again to the shortest day of the year, and this hill I have climbed  before, often with Ronan, and sometimes others, and that moment when you sit on the bench under the folly and survey the sprawling ember-lit city. Nothing for it then but to descend, winding back down past the embedded millionaire's houses. Ronan found a word to describe this much-coveted real estate twinkling like an expensive Christmas tree in the darkening evening: cosy. Yes, it is the supreme apogee of cosiness.