Eleven Eleven Eleven

No, not like that. Like this: 11/11/11. Now it looks special, as if something has slotted neatly into place: a code, an oblique message, interchangeable Roman numerals, a form of writing similar to ogham's slashes on stone.

How we love to read stuff into stuff! But the day was special in its own way. Darker and stormier than I've seen in awhile; fallen leaves everywhere, soggy-cornflake-coloured or little Beech leaves still aglow, printed on the paths sepeartely and delicately as scales of vanilla paint, each one fine-boned as a Klee minature, a last gasp of shine.

My cousins Dave and Rhys called over. Rhys had taken some excellent shots of a diver braving the huge waves at the Forty Foot (that bathing place memoralised in Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus' swimmer 'moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.'

I decided to see for myself what the sea was up to, so when I collected the wean from school I drove him there on a mini-magical-mystery tour. Not a swimmer in sight.; sea filling the place with its enormous dragon-breaths, carpeting the concrete with webs of spume, dragging away out, out... momentarily flat and quiet, then that sudden warp, a shock of ivory, air bright and and glassy and slomo as a collision, an accident sculpted and hung out to dry. Wonderfully invigorating, and the wean screamed and whooped with delight. Thenhe tired of it and wanted to go home and watch Spongebob.