Dublin

It lashed rain in garish Temple Bar.

Back in loud Dublin following weeks in the whispering landscapes of W Cork. I experience an automatic tensing moving through the crowds, which are chaotic, not following an apparent predictable pattern. There is much bumping-into of people, each collision rippling outwards and setting the scene for the next imminent collision, yet everyone gets through with surprising speed. The indigenous walk at about twice or more the pace of visitors, so navigation requires a constant visual reckoning in the rapid micro-decisions on whether to brake or accelerate. To brake behind a throng of Italian visitors might well change the course of the entire afternoon. It is much like watching an animated diagram of electrons in an average piece of iron before the delivery of a charge. All the electrons are hurrying about minding their own business, somehow avoiding being creamed by any number of the other thousands of millions of nearby electrons narrowly averting disaster themselves. Mind boggling to watch but if you were an electron yourself it would probably seem normal.
Joan's apt is a welcome sanctuary to which I can withdraw, drink tea and think about this.....

two ipod pics stitched side-by-side of the view out 

Joan's window on a starkly sunny  day, one taken

at 10am the other some hours later.

A gathering at a restaurant on Talbot St for Joan's birthday. Ann took the picture and must have said something that spurred myself and Peter to adopt the paper-slippers look. Good food and fun was had by all.

Cubic

I don't know how this is achieved; a fan with strings that open and close the blades cleanly inserted into a large glass window. It seems to float. One of these remained in the big plate glass window of the former shop which became the sitting room again in Portmarnock, following the relocation of said shop to a new extension. The reclaiming of the sitting room with it's black and white telly was welcomed, by the same individuals pictured above, as it happens, and the perennial squeak maintained by the idly turning fan in the glass was grimly tolerated.