Paddy's Day: Pissing Rain (etc.)

Got the DART into town to meet Dave/Slant and wade into the Paddy's Day crowds. We did this last year and the year before and the year before that.. So it has become a kind of tradition.

Every parade is asking to be rained on. Today the skies obliged, so it was a pain to try to keep the camera dry.

I wasn't in the mood for it, feeling a bit off-colour, the wrong shade of green. But then I am rarely in the mood. I don't care for Paddy's Day (the equivalent across the water would be Union Jackboot Day). And I care for the parade even less. I have never bothered to photograph it. The crowds are what interest me and Dave: the marvelous variety, so many painted faces, so much trumpeting loudness alongside the infinite little quiet dramas, everyone, despite themselves, in their own dreamspace. Humans are alone. There is only one person behind each pair of eyes, and occasions like this "gathering" only highlight the inescapable. But that's what I like about us, our separateness, the individual faces in the crowd.