A Sardinian Sunset

Alghero, September 2022

In the evenings, beneath our windows, a crowd gathered to watch the sun go down over Capo Caccia.

The compact old town’s ‘cobbles’ could be more comfortable underfoot instead of being just pebbles on edge, set in concrete. Wear appropriate footwear. You will see also one or two lines of flagstones on many of the narrow streets but the people and bikes coming against you will prefer to use them too.

The nicest cafe I saw (and sat at more than once) was the Girasol at the southwest corner of the old town.

Here’s a short Italian lesson from the rush of our last morning, when we had to be out at ten. A busy tout (delatore = informer) hailed a cop car to tell the lads I was putting a supermarket sacchetto (plastic bag) of rubbish in a street bin, all of which usually had glass bottles and pizza wreckage filling them by nightfall anyway. I talked my way out of it by explaining the nationality (always advisable) and the circumstance (see above). The polizia just told me to bring the few plastic bottles I had left back to the apartment. That retired couple of ficcanesi (busybodies) had to be out on patrol early for the likes of me. 

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2001)

I’ve mislaid the handwritten originals of the entries for 28 April and 19 December.

The portent that was the financial Fido appeared on 30 March; the garda gymnast did his thing on 22 September.

8 January (from an email)

March

April

19 December

P.S.

In case anyone might think these exhibitions (1996-2003) paint an excessively lurid picture of the capital, it’s worth checking out this passage by Emmanuel Kehoe in the Sunday Business Post of 17 June that year.

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (2000)

Released from a FÁS prison camp in Finglas in the spring, I got a job in localization thanks to a friend at the company.

Looking back, I really should have brained the miserable slug from Tunbridge Wells for docking me half an hour but that January I must have been at a particular spiritual low not to do it.

The next entry is taken from an email I sent on 11 October 2000. (The upshot was that the security man subsequently charged a fiver fee to anyone needing his cubbyhole to stash shopping.)

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1999)

It was a year of Dublin sights and sounds shaped by

(a) getting shafted in March by DCU, those campus cowboys who had already broken my heart in my efforts to get fully paid (and on time)

and

(b) the unwise choice of a computer programming course in a FÁS prison camp on the Jamestown Road* in Finglas.

The latter began in July, while I was trying to finish a Ph.D. in Maynooth.

*I should add that I was already washing my hands when ordered from the “staff” toilets in Finglas.

February

March

*a prospective housemate playing golf while naked on the estate green rang an alarm bell or two.

July

August

September

December

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1998)

On 8 March, all that remained of the car was a number plate, given to the police by a little kid at the flats. Already loose, it had fallen off as the joy riders bounced over the ramps. 

February

March

*There was a Perspex skylight over the back table.

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1997)

Dublin Wildlife Exhibition (1996)

Having moved to Dublin in the middle of 1996, I wrote down what I saw and heard, like the random street violence, the accidents, the media types, the midnight ramblers, the Hieronymus Bosch culinary scenes of the Gigs Place, the Parnell Road welfare interrogations, and, through the keyhole of painting and decorating, an air hostess leaving her poetry scattered on a dressing table.

May

June

August

September

October

November

December

P. was sitting on the remote control, hiding it from the two older fellas in the room, who wanted to watch Glenroe. It was his revenge for one of them emptying his colostomy bag early that morning (“while I was having my egg”).