Grain Warehouse

Remarkable day photographing and filming in the docklands with Fiachra, in the huge warehouse next to the Odlums building. The men who worked there (Joe, etc.) were immensely helpful. The experience made me aware, yet again, of just how approachable people can be if you're open and approachable yourself. Joe showed me around downstairs. Heavy duty machinery everywhere, but very old fashioned looking, the kind of heavy industrial interior you'd expect to see in a 1920s gangster movie. The place was alive, vibrating, thrumming; every so often a noise like breathing as the immense silos above us filled with grain, cargo from the Iraqi ship docked just outside; and always somewhere nearby, inside and out, the grey, restless, whirring, shuffling and fluttering of pigeons, church-sized cobwebbed windows crisscrossed with shadowy flybys. I enjoyed the sense of feeling dwarfed, mouselike, lost in the works.

Later another man, Pat (I assume he's a stevedor or warehouse worker) led me into the storage warehouse next door. Verily a cave of wonders, with a 'cliff face' of grain, some of which was disturbed, looped with tracks: the fox who comes at night to help himself to pigeons and possibly take refuge in the warmth.

Later still we met with D and checked out the austerity protest in Merrion Square.