costa time! 26 January 2009
I am off to London’s town tomorrow to judge Book of the Year for the Costas – it’s the end of a long and interesting journey. I’m really looking forward to being ‘home’ in Soho too (however briefly) though not so much looking forward to the 5am car to Heathrow on Wednesday to get me to the 6.50am flight back to Dublin and straight into rehearsals at 10 (and lunchtime is full of phoner interviews so a little lie down may be out of the question – and yet…).
We have moved to a larger rehearsal space deep into the Docklands in Dubbalin and it is most instructive to see what’s happening there now. The boom led to all sorts of buildings being thrown up for banks and big insurance companies and so on (there’s a Financial Centre there) but now it is just an expanse of buildings, empty and most of them with all the lights on. It’s a ghost town, really, and full of signs advertising flats for sale and retail outlet ‘opportunities’.
I did so much bouncing on the castle today (within the aforementioned wasteland) that I think I have made my right side ache – it feels like the same thing I get when I wake up after a mighty night out and have what feels like bruising, having (perhaps, we can sometimes never hope to know) bumped into lots of things and walls and hedges and so on. Actually, recently, after not too bad a time on the beer at all at all, I found my lovely cashmere knitty coat had quite a few sprigs from the bush by the door on it – a simple brush by, I decided and not an actual immersion in the bleddy thing….
