Season's Greetings, Pigeon House Road

Managed to goad the wean out of the house for a brief gambol in The Secret Park with Lola (brief enough for the latter not to become too muddy). It was getting dark, as always. I had wanted to accomplish two things: to get him (and her) out of the house and take some photographs before the light went. The second was now impossible, so, night photography once more, and the best place for this might be the docklands, its container parks with their Goliath cranes exerting the usual magnetic pull. 

Traffic. Blast. I'd forgotten I'd be driving into the dawning rush hour. We phoned Sam to see if she was leaving work yet. She'd left already and was in Stephen's Green, but could come back to the office (near Hollis St.) and pick up the wean and Lola if they desired. The wean did of course, and took the dog with him. So I was alone in my little car again, wedged into the gridlock inching towards the quays and Sam Beckett's bridge. I wonder if he'd have appreciated the honour. That harp shape may be a 'secular icon' but surely it's more reminiscent of Yeats and other triumphant 'leading twilighters' than the murky ennui and savage despair of Estragon & Vladimir, Krapp, Belaqua, etc. 

But the docklands would make a fitting home for Beckett's ghosts and (for some yet unfathomable reason) mine too. From the moment I sank my Wellingtoned feet in the copious spilled maize on the Alexandra Basin quays and smelt that rank, crusty-old-sock stink (the air thick with the near-distant beeping and rumbling machinery), I was at home. I wandered into the nearby warehouses with their spotlit 'cliff-face' of grain, as perfectly structured as a stage, the main actors being a range of silences and noises off (artic lorries passing like rolls of thunder and disturbed pigeons whirring and ruffling in the metal rafters, their wings delicately drumming off the huge corrugated roof and raising little puffs of grain like snow flurries on the highest ridges). 

I took a series of shots here then drove over to the far end of the quays, where there was a huge cargo ship in port and in one of the canvas-roofed warehouses men walking about behind what looked like a parked tank truck. One of them approached me. His name was David Bollard. He was perhaps my age and had worked on or about the docks most of his life, like Harry, the man we filmed a couple of years ago. And like Harry's father, his dad was a 'button man', a hirer of dockside labour. Almost everyone I've met during my docklands visits has been friendly, forthcoming and open to talking and being photographed. David was no exception.

I took the East Link to get home quickly, but pulled in off the roundabout when I noticed this festive caravan. I wrote a poem about the travellers on Pigeon House Road, which was published recently in The Morning Star. Not a traveller in sight this evening though. 

Later I got a call from X, who asked if we could meet once more, in O'Rourke's in Blackrock, before he heads home across the pond. We settled in among the warmly chattering Christmas crowd, mostly young (i.e. as young as we felt ourselves to still be in our bemused late-middleaged heads). We joked quite a bit, as usual. He is calm about the coming 'procedure', depending as it does on CT scans, etc. Far more calm than I'd be, I suspect. I love the bastard. He's one of my oldest friends. Not much more to say. I walked him to the DART and we embraced hurriedly when his train came. I can still feel his bristly Desperate Dan cheek on mine.