Last October we took a week away in Elviria, near Marbella in Spain. I haven’t posted since returning, but there is work in the pipeline. I am penning a series on Andalusia, the region in Spain that includes a few places I have been, Malaga, Grenada, Marbella and Ronda, and a few places I haven’t; Seville and Cadiz, yet. Meanwhile,  I am wintering at home, as usual. This particular work is set close to home. The original photo was taken by a backseat passenger and focusses on the receding view of Bray as we head north on the N11 towards the M50. Being a rearview, we can’t see where we’re going but have an ever-shrinking view of where we’ve been. A bit  like life, I supose. 

To which end I spend my days

within the poetry of motorways

In this acrylic it’s late Autumn and near the end of a rainy evening. You  may just about make out a flyover in the distance and beyond that the Small Sugarloaf, or Giltspur, is consumed in the glare of the setting sun. The banner across the top of the rear window advertises Mooney’s car dealership on the Long Mile Road in Walkinstown. Shades of my youth lie there. My old school Drimnagh Castle was on the Long Mile and a whole vortex of memories is carried on the winds thereabouts.

Where ghost musicians haunt roads and lanes 

with harps that once and old refrains,

I recall that I used to go on the hop some afternoons and head out along the Long Mile towards the Naas Road. One companion then was Gerry Ryan. There was one occasion where we got as far as the Red Cow Inn (a small bar then, in the early seventies) slaked our thirst with a pint and headed back home. Gerry was a nippy winger and went on to play soccer for Bohemians over in Phibsboro. He would graduate to the top division of English soccer with Brighton and Hove Albion and of course was capped as an Irish international. He stayed in Brighton after retirement and ran a pub, the Witch Inn in Sussex. Gerry suffered poor health in recent years and returned home to D12. He died in October at the age of 68.

There are other shades there also, and I’ve written of them in other ways. A poem of my old hometown might fit within some blues refrain for our theme song. I’ve included a few quotes here. It’s called the Girl from Fox and Geese.

I drive alone at the brink of heaven 

where the Long Mile Road meets the N7,

sipping absinthe from a billy can, 

the hi fi tuned to Steely Dan.

So, this is how the planet dies 

beneath the swollen sulphur skies,

as mercury blooms on bonewhite trees 

at five to six in Fox and Geese.