Marking Time

Bear with me. I’m going as fast as I can…

I remember someone once describing the every day experience of Ireland’s grey low skies as like ‘living inside a tupperware container’. The weather in Spain for the past week has been like that. And, apart form the obvious restrictions it has put on my outdoor activities, it has also affected my mental health a little. I don’t have the usual spring in my step that I have come to take for granted.

Which makes me wonder how well I will cope when I return to Ireland. For return I shall. We have agreed to drive a people-carrier to Ireland - via France and the Rosslare-Cherbourg ferry - this summer. We’ll load all our worldly possessions into the van and drive just over a thousand miles. To the inside of a tupperware container. I can’t wait for the journey although I’m a little apprehensive about what I’ll find at the other end.

I’ll miss my life here. The climate, the quality of life, and the freedom are hard to beat. But I know I can’t go on living like this forever. It’s not just the financial viability of my life of leisure that is at issue but - more importantly - the lack of challenge and obstacles in my life. For the most part I have only done what I wanted to do over the past year-and-a-half. I have not been compromised by a boss, a deadline, a job; nothing. It’s nice for a while but it’s not good if you do it for too long.

So come the autumn I will return to the fair green land for a while, and experience all the obstacles and challenges that it has to throw at me.

As I’ve said before: It should be interesting.

I just signed up for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Course. It starts after Easter and lasts for four weeks 9-6, five days a week. Pretty intensive.

I’m looking forward to it. The experience will do me good. For the first time in almost two years I have to do what someone else tells me. i need a bit of discipline. Also, the qualification will open up new opportunities for me. Plus, I think I’d like to be a teacher.

Yeah, it’s like watching paint dry but we’re nearly there. It’s a painful piece-by-piece progress at this stage. I’m almost at the stage where I can lay all the pieces out in front of me and see what I need.

I’m looking forward to the magic moment when the last fifty or so pieces just find their way home with little guidance from me.

I haven’t been able to access this log since Thursday due to a problem with my ISP. I have been stunned and shocked for the past few days but I’m getting over it now. I was very close. Here is what I wrote on Thursday afternoon.

What can I say? I take these trains every day. I am numbed by the familiarity of the pictures on the TV. The railway stations, the red and white Cercanias trains, the commuters; these are the backdrop to my daily routine. There but for the grace of God go I.

What hits me next is the randomness of it, the futility, the utter waste. There is no political gain of any sort to be had by this act. There is no strategy, there is no master plan, there is no justifiable and noble end to these means.

What hits me then is my own ambivalence to so-called ‘armed struggle’, especially in my own country. It is easy to point the finger at the stick-in-the-mud Unionists in Northern Ireland and say ‘why don’t you move on, let bygones be bygones for the sake of peace?’ from the comfort of an armchair in the south, safe in the knowledge that you can go shopping of a Saturday morning without the fear of being scraped piece-by-piece off the pavement a few hours later. Not so easy when death’s shadow comes hovering over your own front door. This morning we felt trapped in the city - paralysed, almost afraid to move. How would we feel if we had to endure that everyday?

Yes, we are right to encourage people to sit down and talk and look to the future. But we are wrong to attempt to lighten the sufferings of the past or attempt to sweep them under the carpet in our impatient rush to Utopia. We walk a fine line between bringing the outsiders in from the political wilderness and justifying their past atrocities. If you haven’t lived amidst a direct terrorist threat you cannot hope to understand how it can affect you. Yesterday I would have looked to Northern Ireland with disdain and frustration at their interminably slow progress to a settlement. Today I am again filled with admiration for those - from all sides - who have managed to come this far.

I am writing this in a park near the exhibition centre where they are bringing the bodies. All around me there are sirens blaring. There is a shortage of ambulances. Streams of hearses are passing by. There are appeals for blood donors and for motorists to stay off the roads. There are almost 200 dead. Four bombs in three stations. A fifth that didn’t go off. Crowded public spaces. Easy targets. Politically insignificant targets. Even ‘fellow travellers’ of terrorist organisations cannot justify something like this.

My mother phoned me this morning to see if I was OK. It took her a long time to get through due to the demands on the telephone network. God knows what she thought when the news came on the TV.

There is an eerie calm about. People are not sure what to make of this. They are caught between getting on with their daily routine and wondering if they should be doing something more - reacting somehow. But how? It’s as if a meteor fell from the sky. As random as that.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

Working my way down. Not far now but it’s all trees and 40 shades of black.

Slow progress… a little lake beside the pot on the left and working my way slowly down through the trees on the right.