homesI am away in my beloved Tuscany on holiday, and it’s wonderful to be here, especially to be back in the beautiful Chiusure where I spent my sabbatical. I consider myself blessed to have a sense of having two places that feel like home, and realise that, even though I’m only ten months back in [...]
This homecoming business is tricky. The subtleties and nuances of Irish life, my new Irish life, are proving to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Although, of course, I should not be surprised. Memory is a trickster. The deeper, more personal reasons why I left in the first place have, of course, not gone [...]
Sentimentality is something I try to avoid. My understanding of it is that it is an expression of emotion, prompted by the idea that one should be feeling it; it’s a mental construct, as opposed to something from the gut or the heart or the groin. But it’s unavoidable; we cannot live our lives expressing [...]
Well, I’m in Dublin, and here to stay, it seems. I feel very strange – moving is stressful, but moving countries is bizarre. I feel dismembered, scattered over Europe, with paperwork still coming from London, boxes still to come from Italy, my Irish identity still not sorted, but on its way. I’ve still not moved [...]
Dublin again. This time it’s for Web2Ireland, and to do lots of concrete financial stuff like re-awaken my Irish tax number from 13 years ago, open bank accounts and all that jazz. This is the first time I’ve felt the emotional tug of homecoming, and it has been heightened enormously by watching In America by [...]
The gods have been kind to me. I walk in to a 50th party of a dear friend of mine the weekend before last, (the main reason I came to Dublin this time around). Within five minutes, I’m chatting to someone I hadn’t seen in, maybe, five years, and even then only briefly; we used [...]
Dublin
Am here for a couple of weeks, and it’s fascinating/terrifying/challenging/exciting to consider the prospect of moving back, after my time in Italy is up. Thirteen years away from your home town is a long, long time. I have, of course, been aware of the changes in the city, through my visits to the folks and [...]
This is five minutes or so on cycling home on my Dahon Cadenza.
Listen:
There’s a palm tree in the back garden of my parents’ house in Dublin. About ten or twelve feet high, it has leaves like swords, fierce and young and straight at the top, bristling vertical, needle-sharp. Circling outwards, the more mature leaves broaden and sag to horizontal. Underneath them all, the oldest leaves hang down, [...]
Interesting
