New Year's, The South Bull

New Year's Day: The Great South Wall
A lovely new year's last night and into the early hours with my two sisterly cousins Iz and Susie, in Iz's flat in Temple Bar. Wrote something about it earlier this afternoon:

On a narrow metal balcony –– the starboard deck 
of my cousin’s flat over The Liffey –– we watched 

as it reeled in on the far bank each bright 
submarine double-decker and blue

ambulance-light, the occasional firework 
desultory as the sparkler someone was waving out 

a window above us. But where 
were (Quasimodo-voice) ‘the bells, the bells…’

buffed out by traffic? So we crossed
to the other balcony, cloistered, folded in 

to a concrete Medieval courtyard
where, yes, there they were, bells

finding their belfry, bonging the humped streets down 
on our heads, finally placing us.

Then waking very late this morning/afternoon to see the scoured wet streets mostly empty, a washed-out Dublin, the river olive-grey and higher than I remember for ages, surging and unreflective. 

Home later, having done a bit of writing and gone for a jog in the park, a good start to the year (even though I am a bit repelled by the idea of 'resolutions', as if we all need to join a big dumb buck-me-up club to get anything done) I glanced out the window and saw the evening closing fast, a great broody cloud-shelf damping out what was left of the light. 

So out of the house then with camera and tripod, determined to get an image to start the year on, even if it was something overly familiar: Howth flickering alight or some ship in the docks. Drove all the way out the South Wall, stopping at the Hammond Lane dock to take a few shots (mainly yes, Howth, and streetlights in big puddles (as above). Then I reversed and saw these two men in a van, backlit by gloom-purple clouds slashed with the distant lights around Dublin Bay. 

Some sense of a story then. And when I went over to talk with the men they were friendly, delighted to talk, Simon and Nicholas, a young man with an interestingly older friend. You put names and voices to images and of course they change, lose some of the interesting ominousness of strangers in a lonely place. But it was good to talk with them, two interesting and warm people, open to passing the time of night. Happy new year strangers.