Cassandra Voices

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  • Exit through the Vestry

    Vestry 

    /ˈvɛstri/                                         

    Noun

    • a room or building attached to a church, used as an office and for changing into ceremonial vestments.
    • a real estate investment trust (REIT), incorporated in the Republic of Ireland.

    There comes a moment when you discover a person the trajectory of whose business affairs appears to embody the rotten nature of Irish housing. Such people are often perceived as visionaries of the real estate market, top of their class in producing a return on investment through a system that permits widespread human suffering. One such visionary is Richard Moyles, director and largest shareholder of The Vestry General Partner DAC, one of Ireland’s most powerful landlords. Moyles is also a director of Be Lettings, the letting agent Vestry uses to manage its tenancies and properties. Characters like Moyles are endemic in our communities. We are told that their investments are what make the world spin. Sure, only for them, wouldn’t it all be so much worse? Or, as the American President laughed with the Taoiseach on the subject of the Housing Crisis, “It’s a good problem to have.” In this piece, I push against this narrative – with Richard Moyles as a touchstone, and paint a picture at the iceberg’s tip. This is not, however, Richard’s story. It’s the story of a mother and her young son with nowhere to go; the same story as thousands of other tenants whose lives are determined by the decisions of men and women like him.

    Jen has lived in an apartment in Dublin 1 for a decade, becoming Vestry’s tenant when the group acquired the property in 2021. Her son, Danny (aged 5), has known no other home. Vestry bought the apartment from Grant Thornton for €325,700, after the previous landlord went into receivership and Grant Thornton took control of the property. “The landlords were changing like socks,” Jen told me over the phone. She received a letter through the door, explaining that the property had changed hands, and that she would now be Vestry’s tenant. “No one asked me”, she said, “if they want to sell the apartment, I should be the first person they asked.” Vestry’s control over the property immediately made Jen and Danny’s situation insecure. Under the previous owner, Jen had signed a lease until January 2026. Vestry were under no legal obligation, however, to honour this agreement. “The law is on their side,” Jen said.

    Jen’s case is among the fifteen disputes between Vestry and their tenants that have come before the Residential Tenancy Board over the last six months. Her story is quite typical of many of those before the RTB – the landlord wants to sell, and the tenant, caught in the tempest of the housing crisis, cannot leave. Jen told me that Dublin City Council offered to buy the property under the tenant-in-situ scheme. Vestry, however, declined the offer which would have secured a “market rate” purchase for Vestry and a home for Jen and Danny. A win-win scenario, one would have thought. “My main issue is that there is no transparency between government bodies, landlords, and tenants. I don’t understand why it [the DCC offer] was so secret.” A representative from Be Lettings told Jen that they were looking for between €350,000 and €375,000 for the apartment. When Jen asked the DCC worker charged with acquisitions under the tenant-in-situ scheme what offer was made to Vestry, she was looked at “like (she) had two heads.”

    When I went to visit Jen and Danny, accompanied by members of the Mountjoy-Dorset branch of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), Danny’s energy and curiosity was infectious. Jen and the CATU members decided to knock on every door in the apartment building, with Danny’s exuberant voice echoing through the stairwells as his mother pleaded her case to her neighbours. He showed us his favourite book, Torben Kuhlmann’s Lindbergh – The Tale of the Flying Mouse. The book tells the story of what Danny described as a “genius mouse”, who is forced to flee Germany after the humans create a labyrinth of mouse traps, leaving himself and his friends on the run. The similarity between Danny and the little mouse was, frankly, striking. Surplus to Vestry’s requirements, little Danny and his mother must now make their way in a city filled with the sorrow and stress of displacement.

    One of the CATU members pointed to a leaflet poking out from under the door of one of Jen’s downstairs neighbours. He had left it there a couple of weeks previously. “Well, there’s no one in that house”, the member remarked. How could it be that this woman could be facing homelessness, while a perfectly suitable house seemingly lay vacant, right under where they slept? Such is the effect of a political economy whereby a basic human right, housing, is treated as a speculative asset for men like Moyles to gamble with.

    CATU are currently representing a number of Vestry tenants who are facing eviction by the investment trust. “⁠It’s typical that our members are being put at risk of homelessness due to no fault of their own. It’s also typical that private landlords are prioritising their shareholder profits at the expense of housing insecurity for our members and other tenants,” Lily Palmer, communications officer for CATU Mountjoy-Dorset told me. In response to the evictions, and fearing that Vestry may be carrying out mass, citywide evictions, CATU Mountjoy-Dorset have purchased a dedicated phone for Vestry tenants to contact them, should they want representation from the Tenant’s Union, called the “Vestry Hotline”.

    In 2023, The Ditch reported that Vestry controlled more than 850 homes in the Irish rental market, posting more than €20 million in profit. Company records show that Moyles is the company’s largest single shareholder, through an investment firm wholly owned by him, called Apsone Investments Ltd. Mr Moyles keeps good company with his fellow shareholders, a who’s who of property moguls. Let’s take Silk Shadow Ltd, who control 10% of Vestry. Silk Shadow is owned by property power couple Hilary and Christy Dowling . In 2011, Newlyn Homes Limited, which controls 100% of Silk Shadow had €22 million of its loans transferred to the National Management Asset Agency (NAMA). Christy is also a co-director of Vestry and Beo Ventures Ltd, along with Robert Kehoe and Andrew Gunne. Andrew Gunne, incidentally, was previously a director of Focus Ireland, a charity apparently tasked with alleviating the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. The Vestry group reveals a complex web of companies, all with their fingers in the Irish home market, or indeed, the Irish homeless market.

    Moyles, along with Vestry co-director, Robert Kehoe, are directors of Be Lettings. Be Lettings describe themselves as “a leading residential letting and management business with a nationwide portfolio of houses and apartments”. In at least one case Be Lettings has sold properties to Vestry itself. One effect of such ‘house flipping’ is rampant inflation in the housing market. For example, a 3-bed, 2-bathroom, semi-detached house in Dublin 15 was bought in November 2019 for €287,500.00. In January of 2025, the same property was sold to Moyles’ Vestry by Moyles’ Be Lettings for €400,050.00. Land registry documents show Vestry is this property’s current owner. It was surely no coincidence that Be Lettings facilitated the sale, allowing Moyles to benefit through his shareholdings both from the sale of the property, and from its future tenancies. According to Vestry’s accounts this home, and Jen’s, are listed as a security for a company called Situs Asset Management Limited. This means that should Vestry fall into financial trouble, the home can be seized by Sistus, with little recourse or security from homelessness for whatever tenant may be renting the property.

    Moyles currently has a case before An Bord Pleanála, which was lodged in October of 2024. The case concerns an application for a fire safety certificate for a property he leases at 21 Denmark Street, Dublin 1. The case file reads “for material change of use from flats/bedsits to B&B rooms with other material alterations”. This is precisely what Dublin does not need: more B&Bs at the expense of permanent residences.

    When I visited the property it was clear that work was ongoing in the building. Stacks of rubbish were piled high next to it, and the door was bolted shut with two heavy padlocks. This property – a listed building built in c.1790 – is not owned by Vestry, Moyles, or other associated entities. The building’s Land Registry file shows that it is currently held under a leasehold from a company by the name of Dubres Strategies Limited. This company is not registered in Ireland, but Malta, according to leaked documents found in the Paradise Papers. The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world’s most powerful people and companies, led by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. A man named Rodney Lee Berger is Dubres Strategies Limited’s director. He and Corinne Hilary Berger are directors of Dubres Capital Limited, a company incorporated in the Republic of Ireland, with an address at 13 North Great George’s Street, a stone’s throw from the property at 21 Denmark Street.

    Vestry’s purchase of Jen’s apartment was not the first time Moyles had cause to deal with Grant Thornton, in their capacity as receivers. In 2011, when Moyles was a director of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited, The Bank of Scotland appointed Grant Thornton as receiver. According to the receiver’s abstract submitted to the Companies Registry Office, dated 18/12/2019, Grant Thornton collated receipts of €33,511,913. In 2014, National Asset Loan Management Limited appointed Mazars as receivers to Moyles’ Shelbourne Properties Limited. Remarkably, this is a different entity to Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited. According to the receiver’s abstract presented by Mazars, they took control of €23,975,661.56 of assets associated with the former company. It’s strange how the same man can be a supporting character in the downfall of one property giant, dust himself off, and appear on the other side of the ledger, purchasing a stressed asset from the very same receiver who had previously confiscated his holdings. As Mac from the 2005 comedy TV series ‘It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia’ put it: “I’m playing both sides, so I always come out on top!”

    Artist’s impression of the ‘Chicago Spire’.

    Moyles shared his directorship in both companies with Garrett Kelleher, who tried to sue NAMA for $1.2billion in a U.S. court, after his Anglo-Irish Bank-funded “Chicago Spire” vanity project failed to get off the ground. In 2009, prior the  resignation of Chris O’Connell as the head of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Ltd, O’Connell told the Irish Times: “In the short term it’s (referring to the establishment of NAMA) going to mean uncertainty for developers, bankers and investors alike, but it’s the key to the resurrection of this market over the next decade and it’s going to generate significant business opportunities at a number of different levels,”. And indeed, the offloading of bad loans from the bankers’ books by NAMA has created significant business opportunities. It could certainly be argued that this mechanism has allowed Moyles, Kelleher, Dowling and the crew to continue their honest work as lowly property moguls.

    “He doesn’t want to leave”, Jen told me, “he has his swimming lessons here, he has his little pals, his little life is going to be disrupted”. We must confront Jen and Danny’s reality, and the reality for some 15,286 people currently in homeless accommodation in this “Republic”, 4,653 of whom are children, with countless more contending with crippling rents, inflated high prices and insecure tenancies. If this is a “good problem to have”, who is it good for? Certainly not those people, and certainly not those paying exorbitant rent for mouldy studios. Is the problem housing supply, that “Ireland is Full”, or something else entirely? When we start asking the right questions we may start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Once we establish, as a basic cultural norm, that little Danny’s right to a roof should take precedence over Moyles’ right to make money from that roof, then, we might start excavating what is rotten about Irish housing. Until then, the carousel of real estate investment will keep turning, and little Danny and his mother will remain on the sidelines, not knowing what comes next.

  • Musician of the Month: Ronan Skillen

    Music has always been my favourite mystery. As a medium, an energy or exchange, there’s no other frequency that carries as much potential.

    I grew up learning classical music as a French horn player in orchestras. Most of my teenage years were spent exploring musical brass ensembles from the Baroque era. However, deep down, I was always drawn to rhythms and unusual textural sounds, and fascinated by music production. I initially discovered improvisation by playing the didgeridoo, before going on to study tabla in India and other hand percussion in West Africa and South Africa. I’ve continued to explore a combination of hybrid contemporary percussion, which I incorporate in my music and ever-changing percussive set-up.

    A large part of my musical career has been influenced by me having lived in different parts of the world. I was born in Northern Ireland and grew up in Germany, where I spent 18 years before moving to South Africa, where I lived for 25 years. Now I’m back in Ireland, living in Dublin. As a performing artist, I’ve had a very diverse career, spanning many genres, bands and projects, both as a side man and band leader. I’ve toured extensively, and have had the great fortune of sharing the stage with greats such as Johnny Clegg, Rodriguez and Manu Dibango.

    Much of my experience as a percussionist has involved me refining the process of capturing the sounds of my instruments, especially in a live context. This has given me a better understanding of the sonic spectrum of sound, production and recording, prompting me to explore production music for films. This knowledge, coupled with my years of experience as a recording artist who’s played on more than 100 albums to date, further enhanced my understanding of the role of a producer in studio contexts, and has characterised my more current and recent projects.

    As with many artists, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to reinvent myself as a musician, and saw me pivoting from being more of a performing artist to creating soundtrack music. What fascinates me about this genre is the simplicity with which music can function: the musical score provides the emotional content, setting the tone and directly influencing the dramaturgy of a storyline. This type of music-making has been a constant source of exploration, ever since I was involved in creating the score for the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary film, My Octopus Teacher. Ultimately I’d like to be involved in scoring a feature-length film or providing the theme music for a TV series. I’m always working on some sort of soundtrack music, and have made specifically curated library music for several labels over the past few years.

    Soundtracks

    There is a downside to making this kind of music, though. It can be quite solitary and often takes hours of recording specific sounds in sequence, like a puzzle that forms over time. Also, this process can become quite self-indulgent, which is why I’ve been realising of late that the performer in me would like to get back on stage and be part of a new project that I could collaborate on.

    The Dublin music scene is still very new to me, and I’ve not had a chance to explore my place in the live music scene as yet. Irish traditional music fascinates me and I’d be interested in collaborating with trad musicians. I have great respect for the cultural significance of traditional music of this nature, and I realise that my role as a percussionist would have to be carefully curated. I’ve always felt that as long as you learn the basics and don’t disrespect the origins, then you’re in honest territory. It’s important to understand the heritage of musical offerings and find appropriate ways to build bridges with old and new sounds. Instruments evolve, compositions adapt accordingly, and people and new collaborations shape new contemporary styles and genres.

     

    Currently, I’m part of the Ingrid Lukas band, which is based in Zürich, Switzerland. We have regular shows and usually tour at least once a year. There is also a new album in the making. Apart from that, I am a guest lecturer at the University of Limerick’s World Music Academy, teaching tabla and percussion on a part-time basis. One of the concepts I’ve been developing with the students is part of a future project that I’ve been distilling for a few years and is finally coming to fruition. Essentially, it’s a space within which rhythmic exercises can take shape in a group dynamic, where the focus is on listening, working as a unit and understanding the “ghost notes” that make up the space between the beats.

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/didgi_taal/

    Website: http://ronanskillen.com/

    Linktree: https://linktr.ee/didgitaal

  • The Inscrutable Mr. Scruton

    At the end of Roger Scruton’s short book On Hunting, an out-of-print memoir about the British conservative philosopher’s discovery and participation in fox hunting during middle age, Scruton focuses on the final days of his cob Bob. Shorn of the energy needed to gallop in herd-like fashion through the landscape as a part of the hunt, B cuts a forlorn figure. Like a boxer no longer fit for the ring, he appears to live a half-life, waiting ominously for the end to come:

    The time came when he could no longer hunt; nor could he stay in the field, where he would overeat and become bloated and hobbling. Nor could he be ridden, since deprived of hunting, he became increasingly curmudgeonly and depressed, shying at every flutter in the hedgerow (p.131).

    Scruton’s memoir is a defence of country life as it manifests in the sport of fox hunting, a sport banned in the UK on animal rights grounds. Some call the text polemic. Others a rant. Disillusioned with life, the ‘post-modern’ as he calls the contemporary age, Scruton takes refuge in the Cotswolds where he begins riding a pony called Dumbo. Slowly, like a magnet pulling him in, he discovers the hunt. He is soon a true believer. His life changes dramatically through this discovery, as an obsession takes him in its grip. At one point, having taken up a US academic post, Scruton flies home every Friday to hunt at the weekend. He finds in the hunt the essence of an England he academically locates as the springboard of conservatism, a melting point of class interest that pushes against the prevailing accusation that fox hunting is the domain of the posh. Scruton claims fox hunting is an alliance of country folk across class barriers, the trace of an older community life that respects nature as Other to the human realm.

    But he doesn’t stop there. A sentimental urge to dismiss fox hunting as a sport, Scruton argues, lends it cruel and barbarous as an activity, lacking modern sophistication. The fox is invested with piety. Animals are rendered redundant rejoinders of pity and sentiment. Nature, Scruton believes, has little room for pity: the wild takes root in the multiple forces of the herd. Scruton writes of Bob’s impending retirement as a lament to the cob’s lack of purpose when he has been removed from the expenditure of hunting – the ‘flourishing’ of the horse in a multi-species environment.  He turns to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by way of defending the practice of fox hunting as a sport that requires the eternal recurrence of the individual fox to protect the general species. The traditions of country life depend on renewing the species to maintain the hunter-gatherer on the land. This, ultimately, accounts for an attachment to the natural world.

    To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears on the sleeve lauding the book as brilliant and horrible in equal measure. Scruton’s father lamented Old England’s vanishing but had little truck with countryside traditions his son was drawn to. My father, in contrast, was a hunt master and a GP heavily invested in the family planning movement in the West of Ireland (he was involved in legalising family planning as a medical resource). He saw little contradiction in sitting atop nature’s totem as a progressive modern. His interest in tradition did not extend to the Church, its hierarchy or the power it yielded. Like Scruton, my father was drawn to the cross-class dalliance of a sport I was introduced to as a child, a multispecies environment made up of horses, hounds and humans that left a considerable mark as a source of moral debate. The impact of my own involvement with the sport was not just experiential. It was philosophical to the point of ontological. For in the throes of the hunt, horse and human give up their singularity, adrenaline mounts and the normal limits of everyday life are transgressed. The horse jumps fences it would not ordinarily entertain, outside of the collective embroglio of the hunt. An energy pulsates through the collective, as Scruton notes, that engenders the primeval, pre-modern, pushing the group beyond the boundaries of a day to day ‘identity’ that takes root as a singularising force. Like Winterson, I find Scruton’s text both fascinating in parts and deeply problematic in others.

    Scruton’s distaste for modern culture is prevalent across his memoir. He has a disdain for New Labour and Blair’s alliance with Britpop: a regressive force he finds wrapped up in the trimmings of progress. He fails to look outside the official corridors of power, at the parallel culture that rose in the late 80s amidst the slack spaces of recession England. Rave was banned and supressed like fox hunting in the 90s. Scruton hardly mentions a phenomenon that shares many of the melting pot properties he finds in fox hunting, albeit settling in rural spaces after its suppression. Rave culture, as Simon Reynolds and Jeremy Deller respectively argue, loosened the class divide so that tradesmen meshed with students, hooligans with new age travellers, and a culture evolved that transmutes the becoming-animal of the herd into the collective imbroglio of the dance. Scruton does, funnily enough, equate hunting with dancing at one point in his text. The point of intersection, however, lies in class dissolution, de-individuating properties of the collective and an energy manipulated by the adrenaline-fuelled order of the huntsman qua DJ. Hunting and raving manifest in collectives, the chaos of the herd managed and given unity by the totemic figure of the huntsman and the DJ. Both forms of congress are marked by slow tempos succumbing to the impetus of insistent speed: the beat line that affects the dancers, the scent that regales the horse and hound moving, pack-like, across terrain humans follow in suit.

    Does Scruton miss these cultural outlets? Outlets that generate the same collective spirit Scruton finds in hunting? Scruton laments the erosion of rural practices that bind people in labour. Profound alienation comes with modernity, a symptom of a society Scruton feels increasingly enframes nature as instruments. Animals that roamed the land as fellow beings across a multitude of species are readily encountered as instruments with no recourse to the broader collective challenges of the species. One does not have to agree with Scruton, or indeed agree with his support of fox hunting, even his turn to Heidegger, to feel some kind of affinity with the malaise that drives him from the city. I felt a similar malaise. I became disillusioned with suburban city life. Like Scruton, I was fed up with middle class suburbs and customs. I moved to the country in 2017 to get close to a more organic life.

    Scruton leaves London to embrace the last vestiges of old England. Later this year, I will publish a memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland with Dopplehouse Press in the US about moving to the country like Scruton from the perspective of a sheepdog I found on a desolate farm. I discover the old of Ireland. For many years, I disliked Scruton. I saw him as a toff philosopher who represented everything I disliked about toffs in general. I read his book on hunting out of curiosity, and although far from seduced by his argument, valued his reflections on the old. I began to recalibrate my memories of riding horseback in the West of Ireland. One of my abiding memories, and one triggered by Scruton’s text, is jumping stone walls pushed on by the adrenaline that seemed to lift me out of myself. The ‘I’ of individuated self-trappings seemed to momentarily evaporate in time. I resisted the lure of the hunt as a sign of moral decay and spent a lifetime exploring the collective dissolution of the ‘I’ in other transcultural forms. Two events occurred that led me to reflect on this earlier time in my life as part of a book that pressed my own interest in an old vanishing Ireland. First, my father died in a car crash. He was travelling home from a point-to-point in Ballingary in County Tipperary when he collided with another car (Scruton mentions point-to-points as social extensions of the hunting community in his book). I missed a call the evening before, when I was driving from Ballybunnion with kids in tow. My father was doing something he always did, I thought. He could wait. He left behind horses, cats and dogs, and acres of land.

    The second event is captured in the memoir title. It concerns finding a sheepdog named Oscar on a rundown farm, part of an old ascendency listed estate in the wild of East Clare. Oscar was living there alone, and little is known about his early life. He was undoubtedly bred to work sheep and cattle. His demeanour, long-haired and a little bigger than a typical border collie, has been described as a collie and working sheepdog. An animal that is not a pet. The book tells of rehabilitation against the rhetorical ‘where are you?’ that aggravated the mind of a son dizzy with loss. Over the four years explored in the book, a rabbit hole is travelled similar to the hole Scruton discovers in middle age. Scruton absconded to the countryside from London, took refuge in age-old traditions of the land. I too, absconded and took refuge. Unlike Scruton, however, who found in nature the mantra of the herd, the hole pulled me back into an Ireland I had lost touch with over decades of city living, rooted in the symbiotic cultivation of care between a sheepdog and me. Simply, I had to understand a ‘companion animal’ that beyond all consideration of creatures and pets I had encountered before seemed to live on my timeline alone. I wanted to understand symbiosis between species as an ontological foundation of life.

    I began the text as a project. A story that would tell of finding and rehabilitating Oscar in words and illustrations, against the realisation that my father was really gone, during the Covid 19 lockdown. I had extra time on my hands due to the restrictions and sought to make hay while I could. The story starts in 2017 in East Clare, on an abandoned farm and ascendency estate before coming full circle in the summer of 2020. By writing a book about a companion dog that led me to the inscrutable Mr. Scruton, along with many of those who sit on the opposite side of the animal rights debate – Nobel Laureates such as J.M Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk – I was able to find solace, away from the debilitating lockdown, in a world of thought and action.

    The book focuses on symbiosis and companionship. How does symbiosis manifest between a dog and handler? How important are interspecies relations based on work? Unlike nimble short haired dogs running at break net speed, spitting their fire at sheep beckoned to move at the command, subject to a master’s whistle, Oscar is a slow and meticulous mover. Everything happens through his eyes. To understand his behaviour, a being that arrived when the reality of my father’s death was beginning to hit home, I did a Scruton and turned my focus on working animals – went down a rabbit hole of all consuming proportions. But unlike Scruton, I returned to the surface with one unanswered question. I was propelled by a more obtuse problem. Is it possible, I ask, for a nonhuman animal, a dog, to care for a human? For Scruton, the animal fascinates in its instinct, coming alive in the multispecies hunt, like a sheepdog running the galley in line with the farmer’s commands. Symbiosis between nonhuman and human brings benefits. But the question that propels my focus in A Sheepdog Named Oscar is another: can nonhuman animals really care for humans? Is to care a transaction that brings more than utility?

    Perhaps a rhetorical question. A question, or plural, destined for the never-ending to and fro of analysis. But in asking this question I was delving into a minefield that encompassed so much of what is real. By standing on this minefield, I was peering into another world. For years I tried to get Oscar to swim in some way. At the beach, when the tide had come in, I would run into crashing waves in the pretence that I was engulfed by water, the froth of the ocean spinning around in all directions. And though he became visibly frustrated, agitated, dipping his toes in, he refused to swim. He never made it past first base. Sometimes, when crossing a stream near the woods around the corner from our house, I motioned to push him in. I hoped instinct would kick off and he would overcome his fear. But it was too difficult. I could not entrust myself to do it. He trusts me not to hurt him. And I worry that pushing him into the water will hurt him. He looks at me, like he knows things are awry, and his drooping and begging face seems to say so. Scruton criticises animals’ rights activism that, he believes, confuses nonhuman and human. He believes a kind of confusion satiates the impulse to do good (the Disnifying process, as he calls it). Perhaps, in not pushing Oscar, I am not shielding him. Maybe he wants to fall in and swim, and I inevitably hold him back? Walt Disney writes the script and draws the animation. Or something like that. But this argument doesn’t convince me entirely. Too much runs counter.

    Anecdotes rush in. There’s one about swimming, from Sunday of the August Bank Holiday, in 2021. We are driving across county lines to collect our son Anton from a friend’s house in Kilkee and decide to make a family day out. It is high summer, perfect for a picnic and swim. We stop off in Kilrush after seeing, from the car, groups of people picnicking and sunbathing beside water. Then we wander down to the rocks, lay our towels out and keep Oscar on a leash. There are kids and dogs on the beach and people might start to get uppity about him wandering.

    I decide to cool off and tell the gang to mind my stuff. I release Oscar from the leash and let him sit at the rock. I am of the impression he will wait on the sand while I swim, his concentration fixated on my body descending into the water. I make my way further, submerging myself in water shallow for a considerable distance. To swim I need to walk out at least a hundred meters, where there is only one person whose body is fully submerged in water. I push through the water, making incremental advances until the water reaches my waist and then I dive through the water, swimming as best I can in the shallow terrain. The water deepens until eventually I am swimming freely, the silver rays of sunlight bouncing off the surface.

    ‘Get him out. He’s filthy. Dogs aren’t allowed to swim in the estuary,’ the other guy swimming beside me shouts over in my direction. I remember realising it was the estuary we were in, and it was why the water was so shallow for so far, but not really taking in what he meant about a dog. Then I turned to face in towards the beach, where the other swimmers were looking. About one hundred and fifty metres from the shore, Oscar was swimming towards me.

    His head was just above the water line, but I could see that his legs were working in overdrive beneath. I told the other guy swimming who began remonstrating about Oscar swimming like a war had broken out to take a hike. The ‘F’ word might even have been used. I made the point that Oscar was probably a lot cleaner than most of the humans happily swimming in the estuary.

    Oscar swam around my back, circling me until I could hold him, my feet touching the ground. In the moment of touch, the two hearts of two species rubbing against one another, I thought of many times I tried to coax him into water and failed. What had changed? Why did he leave the others and act, pushing against whatever sensation is made manifest in language as ‘fear,’ to be by my side. What was he doing when pushing himself into an experience so foreign to his nervy nature? He was not a swimmer. He hated water. He was a sheepdog bred for land.

    Few sights have overwhelmed me to a point of astonishment, as the one of Oscar swimming in the estuary so far from the beach, an astonishment that captivated my wife and son to the same degree as they watched him swim towards me. In Jason Molina’s ‘Lioness,’ the artist sings of two lions who fall in love. One is on one side of the Nile, the other lives across the river. Their attraction compels them to risk their lives to swim out into the river so that they can meet each other eventually. At a pivotal moment, Molina sings the critical refrain on repeat ‘I will swim to you, I will SWIM TO YOU.’ The song is not really about a lioness. It is about burning rocks of love, that makes two hearts beat as one. It is, for me, about an animal too afraid to swim until a friend and master is in danger. A Sheepdog Named Oscar is an attempt to understand these burning rocks, as expressed in Molina’s refrain ‘I will swim to you.’ These lines manifest as a kind of love that evolves from the blood of a sheepdog and touches a human. Care that emits from a human and touches the life of the nonhuman who swims to him. The sheepdog who watches another fall into water and who leaps into action. What compels Oscar to swim through the cold and alien water, so that ‘I’ and ‘you’ can melt into the temporal plane of ‘we?’ Is it simply love, designed to show humans it exists outside the limitations of the human realm?

  • The Dog that Sang the Blues

    It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

    It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

    The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

    We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

    At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

    We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

    I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

    The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

    As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

    I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

    The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

    “Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

    ‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

    Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

    Feature Image: Hector Perez

  • The Powerful Nature of Addiction

    Back in 2016, I was embarking on a road towards sobriety after nearly eighteen years of committed alcoholism, homelessness, depression, and, in many ways, desperation. I needed to change. However, I did not know how or where to begin. I started with ‘one day at a time,’ taking small, manageable steps. If I don’t drink this week, I will try it next week. That was my mantra, and that’s how it went initially.

    That was when I happened to be in Manchester on my way from Salford, where I had been staying in a homeless night shelter, and walking into town to go to work one Sunday morning, when a fresh-looking can of Carlsberg was sitting all alone on the low or a brick wall near a small park. As to where its owner had gone, I had no clue. Still, I wanted to down that can of fizzy beer. I wanted to guzzle its beery contents down my throat and for it to wash around freely in my guttiwuts (as they put it in Clockwork Orange). Filling me with the desire for more beer, to smoke fags, and to fall about like a drunken imbecile, not being at all the responsible person that I used to be and aligning foolish behaviour(s) I know all too well – being the eternal alcoholic bum.

    Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

    The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

    I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.

    I had been out on the lash in Birmingham the night before and spent a lot of money on a premeditated drinking session. The following day, I jumped on an earlier train, and the conductor came round and asked for my ticket and, inspecting it, said, ‘You’re an hour early; either buy a new ticket which will cost you £35.00 or get off at the next station and wait for your train.’ I choose to get off.

    Feature Image: David Kwewum

    Sobering up has been rather hellish. Seriously, it has.

    For the first five years, I was ill. I was lethargic and had a rumbling stomach. I believe I developed GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), where the lining of the stomach is decimated due to all the booze I tipped down my throat, where it swilled around in there like a dark, seething, twisted, broiling sea.

    During my recovery, if I drank strong, cheap tea bags, the tannins in the tea played havoc with my liver, leading to a dull, searing pain in the lower right-hand side of my upper body.

    In 2017, I went to the GP in Derry, where I was living in a hostel, and he informed me I was having recurring liver infections. He didn’t know what I knew.

    I had a liver scan. There was some ‘superficial’ scarring on my liver, the nurses at Altnagelvin Hospital said. If it was superficial, I didn’t want to know what actual, deeper scarring felt like. No way. This had been painful enough so far.

    The reality was, after years of alcohol consumption, I had liver disease – let’s make no bones about it, leading to recurring infections. And my diet was atrocious, which contributed to my poor health.

    I drank far too many fizzy drinks. I scoffed far too many biscuits – once I sat down with a cup of tea, I would ‘clear the decks’ in terms of consuming high-sugar and high-fat content junk food in one sitting. Tunnock’s Teacakes were a firm favourite; I could consume at least four in one go. I ate crisps by the tonnage and ballooned to nearly fifteen stone in 2020. That’s big for someone of my height of 5ft 7¾, with a small enough frame. I was a greedy, unmitigated, irresponsible (health-wise) git.

    Two years ago, I went to the GP for a checkup as I was feeling lightheaded and had chest pains. My blood pressure was up six points, and I had high cholesterol, I was informed. I was on the danger alert for a heart attack. I think I have had some minor ones. Or Angina, at least. That or it was the GERD.

    These days, I rarely drink fizzy drinks. I seldom eat crisps and opt for baked ones. I would have a chocolate bar at least twice a week. Rarely more than that. I prepare most of my meals from scratch and mostly drink water.

    I recently saw an advertisement on a billboard at 8:44am for a pint of the black stuff, and wanted to imbibe it so badly that I considered going on the ‘drink.’ I swear to goodness that one millisecond glance up at that foamy pint with roasted barley, and I was there with one in my hand, ready to take a good draught.

    That is the powerful nature of addiction – that pull is as strong as it ever was, even though I am currently nine years alcohol-free.

    It takes work to remain sober. I don’t think I ever will be free from alcoholism.

    Only now can I say that I am not drinking. And that’s what I intend for the foreseeable future.

    I’m aware of the downsides, and it’s far from ideal: the anxiety, the guilt, and the worthless feeling(s) that soaking oneself in booze brings.

    At least now that I am sober, I can focus on my hobbies, including writing and making music – two things which bring me joy. And if that gets me out of bed in the morning – I now rise every morning at around 5am – sleeping right through from the night after usually going t to bed around 10pm.

    That is something which I can control and manage. I opt to be busy, which is something I aim to maintain. Things change when people have to.

    Feature Image: Pixababy

  • At the Colònia Güell

    ‘There are only so many times you can be expected to look at the Sagrada Família,’ said my uncle. He was visiting me in Barcelona, where I had returned for a few weeks. He said he wanted to take me to see the Colònia Güell, a lesser-known Gaudí site. ‘You mean the Park Güell?’ I said, thinking he was after sweeping views and stone lizards with mosaic skin. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the Colònia Güell.’ I had never heard of it, despite having grown up in the city. We agreed to go early the next morning.

    We took the tram, sitting in sleepy silence. The grey landscape unfolded. Low walls covered in graffiti, dark tunnels with snaking pipes, tower blocks, warehouses, farmlands, greenhouses with shattered panes. Raindrops made diagonal rivulets on the windows. They squiggled wildly whenever the tram picked up speed. On the chain link fences the occasional yellow ribbon flew by, leftover tokens of solidarity with political prisoners of the Independence referendum.

    When we got out the rain had stopped. The sky was very pale. Light filtered through evenly, making the landscape look strangely bright and shadowless. There were no signs past the ticket barriers, just one long road bordered by pine trees. At the bend, a cluster of brick houses came into view, built on a slope. There was nobody around. No traffic on the road. No place to get a coffee. Leaves collected at the curb, turning to mulch. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and wasn’t used to being awake before noon. Besides, my lighter had run out of fuel so I couldn’t even have a cigarette. ‘Maybe we got out at the wrong stop,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should turn back.’ My uncle took out his phone to check the blue dot on the map. ‘No, we’re in the right place.’

    Barcelona. Image: Enrico Perini.

    We walked towards a large, clay-coloured house, with small windows cut irregularly into the sides and a big chimney of bricks that had been arranged in patterns. The bricks continued at the front of the building, where they were organised into elaborate latticework around the entrance. The walls around were made of rough rock, the surface oddly pocked so that it looked porous. It was the colour of gingerbread. If a nice lady had invited us in I felt sure we would be cooked in an oven.

    We stood looking up at the house for a while. I said nothing because my uncle is an architect, and for all I knew this building was some great masterpiece.

    ‘What an eyesore,’ he said, to my relief. ‘Look what they’ve done. Taking idioms and juxtaposing them in totally inappropriate ways.’

    ‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘What’s with the crazy zig zags?’

    ‘So faux naif.’

    ‘And the chimney?’

    He shook his head sadly. ‘A disaster.’

    We carried on looking.

    He waved his hands in front of him. ‘That texture.’

    ‘What’s that word for the phobia of porous surfaces?’

    Neither of us could remember so I looked it up.

    ‘Trypophobia.’

    ‘Ah.’

    Next to the definition there was a helpful illustration of a hand with some kind of disease spread over the skin in a pattern of small, symmetrical holes surrounded by raised edges.

    ‘Disgusting,’ I said, holding the phone out to my uncle.

    He leaned closer to the screen. ‘Christ,’ he breathed.

    I scrolled down and saw a similar image, this time of the side of a face, the skin of the cheek all eaten away.

    ‘Ugh! Look at this one!’ I held out the screen.

    ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Please.’

    We finally came to a tourist information centre, where a young woman behind a perspex screen charged us twenty euros for two entries. After taking the payment she explained in a mellifluous Catalan accent that because it was a Monday, the exhibits were closed, and it would not be possible to go into any of the buildings, though we were more than welcome to walk around the streets and look at their exteriors. She asked if we would like some audio guides, adding that they were free. This struck me as a perverse way to frame the situation but I accepted them anyway. She handed us two devices like old Nokia brick phones, along with a glossy brochure containing a fold-out map with numbered stops.

    Outside, I pressed 0 and the guide thanked me in a smooth, robotic voice for choosing to visit the Colònia Güell. Then came a potted history of the place. Founded in 1890 by Eusebi Güell as an industrial colony, the workers’ houses were arranged around the textiles factory that was fitted with the most modern technology of the time. The factory employed 1,000 workers in 1908. There were 24,000 spinning wheels and 760 weaving looms, all operated by a 1000 horsepower steam engine. It was conceived as an urban centre with its own character and its own social and religious life, and it was Güell’s mission to improve the conditions for the workers, the voice said, before the introduction abruptly ended. My interest was piqued. It sounded like a truly terrible idea.

    A visit to Colònia Güell in 1910 by the Bishops of Barcelona, Tarragona, Lleida, Vic and Valencia accompanied by Count Güell.

    We continued along the numbered stops: the former consumption cooperative, the storage cellars, the secretary’s house, the convent, the union, the library, the school, and the doctor’s house. The audio guide informed me that the buildings had been designed by Francesc Berenguer i Mestres and Joan Joan Rubió i Bellver in the Catalan Modernist style, that their influences were Gothic and Arabic, and that the brick they used was typical of this region. I learnt about how the factory used brick latticework for ventilation, and to provide areas for the textiles to dry without being exposed to direct sunlight, which would bleach them.

    The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wanted to know. It described these houses only as structures that let air circulate in certain directions, that let sunlight fall across them at different angles throughout the day, shadows rotating and lengthening. But hadn’t people lived inside them? There was something creepy about this obvious omission.

    The feeling of unease crested outside the doctor’s house, a simple two-storey square building with pillars at the corners. After a detailed description of the cornice where the airing holes of the attic were disguised by a zigzag pattern of more bricks, the guide uttered this staggeringly creepy sentence, in the same smooth monotone: The doctor made house calls to visit patients not only to cure them, but to make sure they really were as ill as they claimed.

    I remembered the free therapy sessions I received during my time working as a content moderator one hideous summer after university. My therapist was a kindly gay Chilean man who I lied to week after week, inventing dying family members and killing them off in increasingly unlikely and tragic ways, all in an attempt to get more time off work. The office was in a long glass building with a gym in the basement and a rooftop cafe where I would go along with my colleagues to play ping pong and get abjectly drunk on sugary sangría at the end of each day before stumbling home. I remembered reading about offices with built-in sleep pods and Silicon Valley work campuses so convenient that nobody ever leaves. I remembered my elation the morning that I decided that I would not go into work that day or ever again, that if I spent a single moment longer in that place it would permanently damage my capacity to see beauty in the world. This is what it finally came down to: an instinct to protect beauty, which is really an instinct towards survival. I remembered the faces of my colleagues like a deserter remembers the faces of the ones he left to die.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Something vast and inchoate was rising to the surface. I tried to articulate it to my uncle: that I found the premise of this colony, and the notion of paternalistic capitalism itself, to be false and condescending. It mimicked a utopian vision of communal work and life, but the people in it never saw the fruits of their labour, so it took on a dystopian quality, made crueller by its benevolent pretence. Even if this model town, inspired by the experiments of the English industrialists, represented a considerable improvement on the working conditions of the time, it was still depressing, particularly because it was a cruder and therefore more starkly visible expression of the kind of logic we are still living under, of the kind of existence we have learnt to accept as fair.

    I don’t think any of this made much sense. My uncle just said: ‘Let’s get lunch.’

    The day improved enormously. The restaurant was on a small plaza, a typically Catalan interior; unpretentious and stylish. High ceilings run with beams, glass lamps, star-patterned marble floor, carved mahogany chairs. Two old men sat by the entrance playing chess, and a large dog lounged at their feet. A whole family was gathered on a long table at the back, filling the place with cheerful chatter. The waitress came with a bottle of red wine and a basket of bread. We had asparagus pasta and fish soup for starters, followed by lemon sole. We gossipped about different family members. We finished the wine. Dessert was mel i mato and dark coffee with a shot of cognac.

    Maybe it’s not so bad, I thought to myself as we made our way back out. You go to work, you earn some money, you squander it on a long, boozy lunch, and you do the same thing the next day.

    Image: Colònia Güell, Renato Rocca.

  • Musician of the Month: Dee Armstrong

    I am a self-taught musician, playing fiddle, viola, hammer dulcimer, bodhran and tunes percussion. I am mainly known as a composer, arranger and fiddle player with Kila for the last thirty-four years. I also play with Freespeakingmonkey and The Armagh Rhymers.

    Several generations of my family were and are musicians. My grandmother Maggie Armstrong was a great singer and storyteller who sang old traditional and gospel songs. My father was taught traditional and classical music by Derek Bell of the Chieftains and my mother was a brilliant classical piano player and teacher. Many cousins and my sister all play. My four children play and /or sing.

    I also make massive willow puppets and structures for carnivals and am a community arts worker. I run a Rockschool for kids aged 10 to 18, where kids learn to play in bands, write their own songs and perform gigs and record.

    I have just released my first solo album, Deichtine’s Daughter. The title comes from a poem by Louis De Paor, which I love. Deichtine was the mother of Cúcullin, one of Irelands great mythological heroes. Deichtine means “Ten Fires” in Irish as a literal translation and I loved that.

    However, we know much more about Cúcullin than Deichtine, which is a recurring theme in Ireland where women get written out of history. What if Deichtine had a daughter, or Cúcullin a sister, what would she have been like? Louis de Paor was asking that question to himself, and then he saw her…walking down the road in Galway, swinging a hurl…and she made such an impression on him he wrote a poem for her.

    The poem hit me immediately. It was more a feeling than anything of strength, having a voice, fighting for your rights, fighting for your life. Fire and inspiration. So, the piece of music says that to me. It’s an expression of that. I wrote this piece on the hammered dulcimer, which has an ancient sound, but is very rhythmical, very strong, though at times it can sound delicate like a harp.

    I write intuitively, I don’t read music very well and I learn tunes by ear, and do string arrangements by ear and use the recording process to arrange music usually, as I can’t write it down. It’s all in me head. Tunes usually pop into my head as I am sitting playing the fiddle or banjo or whatever. They express whatever is going on in my life at the time I guess. I try not to get in the way and let it happen.

    My sons will tell you, I often don’t like doing more than one or two takes. I like catching the initial spirit of the piece. Music is an amazing communicator. The feeling of the story is there, as I write tunes and music, there are no words. I often focus on the atmosphere of a piece of music; what’s coming through and emphasise that.

    I studied film in Dun Laoghaire VEC, way back. I ended up doing soundtracks for numerous short films, and this experience was valuable when Kila got soundtrack work with Cartoon Saloon doing animated features for Wolfwalkers, Song of the Sea etc.

    I love working with my sons, writing and recording. Plenty of craic, arguments and door slamming! We are all quite particular, but generally we all get on great. We have a similar musical sensibility I think. Lughaidh and I have been working on soundtracks and stuff for theatre since he was about 14 or 15. He’s a very gifted musician. We both love creating atmospheric soundtracks, and indeed I think this is a shared composing trait with us. There is a visual element, we are painting a picture. Diarmaid is a dancer and he brings another angle into it all with that. We all have a zany imagination and made strange short films over lockdown. We are a creative family

    My daughter Rosie is a lovely singer and my other son Tiggy plays bass. His son, my wee grandson Leon is very musical. He sings away. Sure, who knows what will pop out. Music is my anchor, and it will probably be theirs.

    My cousin Bridget is a great musician, and her kids are all musical and so it goes. If there is a love for it, it will probably continue.

    I didn’t want to play music as a kid, I wanted to be a dancer! So, I came late to the party. My parents tried to get me to play fiddle, and I got a few lessons from an amazing violin player Mary Gallagher, but I just wanted to dance.

    I was into Heavy Metal, Rock, Disco and Funk as a teenager. I never imagined I would play traditional music, but it was always there in the ackground, especially the Chieftains as Derek Bell would come and make reeds with Dad and we would visit Paddy Maloney sometimes. I took up fiddle aged 16 or 17, then had a baby, so it wasn’t till I was 19 or 20 that I took up learning tunes properly.

    Writing music became an expression for me. It depends on the tune, but often I’ll write a tune for a person, as in The Prince of Laughter, or one of my children, as in Django’s. Ed the Visitor is for our legendary dog Ed who was a constant companion through good times and bad.

    Sometimes they just come to me. I dreamt the Killi Willi Waltz. It was funny. I wonder was it the shit loads of B52s I had consumed the night before! Luckily, I crawled over to the fiddle and managed to extract the tune to the fiddle before I forgot it!

    I have dreamt other tunes, but they have slipped away. I think the best tunes come to us in unexpected moments. Wandering down the road, after chatting to a friends; while trying to learn a tune; after a good shag. You just never know.

    I included an old Jewish dance tune, a ‘frailach” on the album. I’m a huge fan of Roma gypsy and Irish Traveller music, also Middle Eastern music, Jewish Music. Nomadic people carry the music with them, absorbing everything they hear and turning it into their own versions of gold. Often the most powerful music comes from the most oppressed. Look at the history of the Blues. The experiences of the people live in the music.

    Music is the lifeline. It can’t be taken away, and then it speaks to us down through the generations. We are witnessing the attempted obliteration of Palestine, and the Palestinian, people currently. So many Jewish people have spoken out against this genocide as it is a repeat of their own suffering. This tune is for them and the people of Palestine and their children, who suffer occupation, death, starvation and destruction every day.

    The album is made up of all original compositions bar Frailach, and Yon Do, which is a traditional Selkie song from Scotland. I liked the combination, and I wanted them all to fit together and these did fit. I wanted it to be an album of primarily my music.

    Eoin Dillon, longtime piper in Kila, and I were playing a few tunes one day, and he wrote one part of the Bearna Waltz. Bobby Lee wrote Prince of Laughter together. He wrote the chords and I wrote the tune and strings. Bobby played a lot of guitar on the album and I loved playing with him.

    Leitrim. Image: Morgan Bolger

    I live in a very wild and beautiful place in North Leitrim, on the side of Benbo Mountain near Manorhamilton since 2001. It’s very different to Dublin, where I grew up!

    Up until the 50s and 60s there were 158 families living in this small townland, all with loads of kids. They nearly all had to emigrate because the land was poor, and it was too hard to make a living. This always resonated with me, and it’s so sad that this had to happen.

    There were lots of music on the mountain and musicians. There was a great musician Micheal Clancy, who was called the man of 1000 tunes. He was from Boihy and his cottage is still there, though he died in the 80s. I am making a documentary about him, as he taught all the people of the area music in his day.

    I had to move to Leitrim because if was impossible to afford rent in Galway or Dublin any longer. You could get a bedsit or a small flat in Dublin in the 80s and 90s for 12 or 15 quid a week. Even if you had little money you could still live in the middle of town where all the action was. You could go busking, go to sessions, meet other musicians and walk home.

    I had a young baby as a teenager, so I was lucky to live with my friends on Wexford Street and they helped me with the baby. Otherwise, I would have been very isolated.

    The scene in Dublin was buzzing when I was growing up. This Lizzy, Sinead O Connor, Dolores O’Riordain and the Cranberries, U2, Aslan, Waterboys, and so many more. There was a sense of excitement with so many great bands and a freedom of musical ideas across the board, traditional and folk included.

    Riverdance and Ireland getting in to the World Cup helped as well! All this meant a lot to us. Suddenly, people across the world wanted to hear us. The Celtic Tiger didn’t do us any favours.

    No one can afford to live in the cities in Ireland now. If you don’t have affordable housing, musicians and artists and ordinary people will have to leave and the community and music scene will be dissipated.

    Luckily, the folk and traditional scene is having a real revival in Ireland again. Look at the wonderful Lankum for example. It’s brilliant to see. I’m looking forward to getting out to a few gigs after being a single mum for years and years!!! It’s exciting!

    I am just finishing a thirteen date tour around Ireland to launch the album. I have more music recorded with my sons. Music the three of us wrote together, and I am hoping to finish that off in the next few months. I’ll be playing festivals in Ireland in the summer and we will see after that!

    Link to Dee Armstrong’s Bandcamp

  • Poem: ‘Where beckons the quiver…?’

    _        Where beckons the quiver…?

    Are there no spirits moving in the air
    _                       ruling the region between earth and sky ?

    And do you shine from the sky
    _                       goddess in decay,
    _                                   as respite from the spit of day ?

    For this world could not hold you ?

    Whose arm twitches with your pulse,
    _                       as your ghost drifts through the lining
    _                                   of the throat ?

    Whose voice crackles as it shouts,
    _                       Whose chest wheezes like a blade of grass,
    _                                   split for air to move through ?

    Were they torn by tongues of anguish,
    _                       the remnants of your melody,
    _                                   stretching a voice into a cry
    _                                   thwarting the borders of a heart ?

    You leave behind that crumpled piece of paper,
    _                       Not the wrinkles of your face.
    If language should leave you,
    _                       alone to the touch,
    where beckons the quiver of
    _                       ageless almighty ?

    Each one of us a teardrop,
    _                       enters the world’s heart chamber
    _                       and congeals before your eyes?

    Do you kiss the half-flown ivory tongues
    _                       that swipe across the many lips ?
    And do the stars cluster,
    _                       as though gulls in search of comfort,
    _                       their screams of spirals broken,
    _                       their feathers like stilled flames ?
    And were eternal chasms or a breath
    _                       to fill the shells
    _                       of their lost melodies ?


    Paul Downes’ latest work     Towards a Concentric Spatial Psychology for Social and Emotional Education Beyond the Interlocking Spatial Pillars of Modernism (2024) is an open access book.

    Feature Image: The Flammarion engraving, c.1888.

  • Who Let the Dogs Out? A Review of Babygirl

    If you count my two unsuccessful (all cough no high) undergraduate attempts to smoke weed and the later (nominally) more successful fractal bits of gummy I consumed (once) at a wedding reception, you must grant I possessed sufficient knowledge and experience with recreational imbibing to feel I was setting myself up for an evening of hilarity when I decided to get drunk and high (with friends, in case you were staging an intervention) to watch Nicole Kidman’s latest brow-raising toast of Tinseltown, Babygirl. Following an oyster repast and several gin martinis, my desire to witness the infamous milk scene in its original context (I’d seen an endless stream of momfluencers parodying it) became oddly irrepressible and very, very funny.

    Admittedly, the film and its lengthy press tour—red-hot topics for keen culture-vultures in the run up to Christmas—are slightly old news: Babygirl has been thoroughly ravished, digested, reviewed and psychoanalyzed by critics everywhere, and resultantly a chorus of voices primed a cacophony of conflicting expectations (liberating! brave! fresh! tired! cliché! smutty! dull! THE PERFORMANCE OF NICOLE’S CAREER!) I was eager to interrogate and settle. I’d read enough about the movie to anticipate a slightly intellectualized 50 Shades of Grey filtered through a modern, sex-positive female gaze. In this regard, the film delivers.

    “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn on you: use me but as your spaniel,” cries love-sick Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Forgive my mildly drug-addled brain for recalling this text—between severe bouts of giggling—and thinking ‘ok, so, same-same, but different’ upon encountering Kidman’s icy boss-bitch (woof) Romy Mathis, a powerful CEO who is so unhappy with her beleaguered conjugal sex life that she fakes *every single orgasm* with husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and self-pleasures to BDSM porn afterwards.

    We are quickly given to understand that Romy—beautiful, successful, and comfortably past age 50—is the deeply depressed prisoner of sexual repression and malaise. Her obvious adoration for her family (laid on rather too thickly by the writers, who *really* need us to understand women can be simultaneously kinky and family-oriented) and work-place chops do not sufficiently off-set the deficit she feels.

    Enter much-younger corporate intern Samuel, (Harris Dickinson) whose mysterious and increasing erotic appeal (situated squarely in classic dominance) ultimately overwhelms Romy, as the two engage in a very risky and protracted entanglement. Claims about Kidman giving the performance of her career are a somewhat doubtful—between Big Little Lies and A Family Affair, I’ve seen enough of her sighing deeply and speaking in breathy, hyper-feminine tones while gazing moodily toward the horizon. Kidman’s acting in this film is basically her classic haunted shtick, plus long, motel-entrenched orgasms.

    Speaking of the big o—if I withhold praise for this film’s acting, I mustn’t do the same for its valor. Lauding Babygirl for boldness makes sense. It does not merely permit, but celebrates unreserved expressions of female sexual pleasure in an ostensibly middle-aged woman; the key takeaway for every feminist with eyes and ears.

    After the big 4-0, female representation in tv and film is generally reduced to variations of ‘matriarch,’ ‘spinster,’ or ‘embittered housewife’; it has certainly not been the standard in Hollywood to explore (or even acknowledge) the sprawling erotic realities of women from whom the bloom of youth has departed. The film is self-aware enough to showcase Romy herself facing this pressure and subsequent insecurities—despite her high-powered position—and receiving Botox injections. In a moving, intimate nude scene, she is fragile and unable to accept Samuel’s assertion that she is beautiful. We can and ought to credit writer/director/producer Halina Reijn’s vision for liberated, integrated female sexuality defined by the mutual emergence of self-acceptance and at any/every age.

    The film attends partially and imperfectly to the psychology of kink, which we experience vicariously in Romy’s need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it, to the tune of the affirmation “good girl.” This is delivered in low, husky tones by Samuel, whose intuitive understanding of challenging dogs ambiguously imparts an intuitive understanding of Romy in the bedroom. The importance of consent gets a cursory dialogue nod, as does the oft-stymying intersection of power dynamics and danger with human sexuality. A savvy (if reductionist) review I read recently was entitled ‘She’s His Boss At Work, He’s Her Boss In Bed.” I was hoping for a deeper, more profound dive into the mental landscapes of Babygirl, but only Romy’s gets serious attention. Samuel’s character verges on lapsing into a one-dimensional tool or supplement to churn up her inner life—even at the end of the movie, we know next to nothing about him.

    For a dark erotic thriller, Babygirl delivers something like a fairytale ending. The explosive discovery of Romy’s trysts with Samuel ultimately serves to usher in a new age of sexual understanding and compatibility between Romy and Jacob, who are happily going at it (in a way that finally fulfills Romy’s needs) at the film’s close. The message is almost disappointingly simple—accept yourself and your desire to make rabid eye-contact whilst downing a very tall glass of milk ordered to the purpose on your behalf in three consecutive gulps..or something.

    I jest, but Romy’s liberation is achieved (too) quickly and (too) decisively; her guilt at being caught red-handed and abusing her professional position along the way all subsumed in new-found erotic contentment. Babygirl asks good questions, but ventures slightly pre-packaged, inadequate answers on the difficult and ever-evolving topics of sexuality, aging-while-female, and the corrosive nature of power.

    The most subversive thread in this film’s tapestry is Romy’s tacit refusal to grovel after an intentional act of enormous selfishness—her illicit liaison with Samuel—paired with the implication that she’s not a bad person—or a bad woman—despite this refusal. Male selfishness is so culturally ingrained and expected it’s become almost acceptable in society—unavoidable, a fact of life we must simply learn to negotiate while we shake our heads resignedly. But the insidious, unforgivable sin of female selfishness (a selfish act committed by a member of the sex universally expected to be demurring and sacrificial) is given a notably fresh turn in Babygirl’s deliberate avoidance of wholesale condemnation. Romy is neither Hester Prynned nor Anna Kareninaed—she retains her status, her relationships and even her composure. What she loses in struggle, conflict and grief is carefully regained in self-acceptance. That’s enough to get a ‘good girl’ from me, and it’s not just the gin martinis talking.

  • Poem: ‘A Chapter in the War’

    A Chapter in the War
    Appian, 95-165 CE

    Under orders from Octavian, the hardened captains – Pansa,
    Carfulenus – patrolled the narrow pass they had determined to defend,
    with the Martian legion and half a dozen cohorts in their train.

    Surrounded all about by mulling marshland, heavy bogs,
    eight miles south-east of Mutina, their suspicions
    as they carried on were roused on either side

    by movement from the rushes; softly here and there a shield
    or helmet seemed to glint, a fog of shining apparitions.
    Suddenly the Antonian praetorians appeared, in grim array.  

    Having nothing in the way of tactical advantages
    or spaces to maneuver, the men instructed new recruits
    to linger at the rear, lest they lose or hamper the attack.

    Then spreading through the swamp, the veterans
    unsheathed their blades and readied for the fray.
    The massacre was brutal – for these were brotherly

    antagonists, Roman known to Roman, lethally opposed.
    Worse by far than war itself, a savagery incarnate,
    is the rending of a nation from within, neighbour

    killing neighbour – the enmity unending. On this occasion,
    the Antonians resolved on rooting out the ones
    they called defectors, in the name of the republic;

    the Octavians believed themselves entitled to revenge
    for the calamities inflicted at Brundisium. Thus
    the armies clashed ferociously, in silence: because

    of their experience, the soldiers never raised a cry,
    knowing their assailants to be seasoned, unafraid.
    No sound was heard but metal in the mist, the guttural

    alacrities of flesh. Since the sodden ditches offered little hope
    of charging or retreat, the soldiery were locked as in a pit
    together, limb to limb, dealing death between them.

    When one fell downwards, blacking out, another instantly
    stepped up into the gap. None had any need of bidding
    or encouragement, for all became their own commanding

    officers in battle. They fought with the intensity
    and muscled grace of dancers, in a muggy April sun
    that never broke. The novices, obeying their instructions

    from the start, watched in wonder as the butchery continued,
    with everywhere an eerie quiet hovering, a shroud.
    Having gained the upper hand at last, the Antonians caroused

    along the avenue, relieved. But history is fickle as a breeze.
    When Hirtius had word of the catastrophe, from Mutina
    he led a squad of legionnaires in haste, and tracked

    the weary victors down the road. He killed them all,
    methodically reversing the result. Octavian was cheered
    by the intelligence. He slept, that night, as gently as a babe.

     

    Feature Image: Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century