Another year older

It's the 30th of August, so another under the wire monthly missive, and when next I write my age in years will have reached another prime multiple and the subject of some demographic disinterest, although it doesn't feel like much of a milestone. All going according to plan (does it ever?) I'll spend this anniversary of my first breaths standing in a field at a festival having just heard The Cure play, which I last did a little over half my life ago, yet it feels no more preposterous an activity now, indeed considerably less so.

All around me friends are getting pregnant, getting married (usually in that order), buying houses and flats, keeping real jobs, having a child and quite often more than one, changing career, moving country, hiring accountants, even willingly going to Ikea. All that grown-up stuff. I've done some of it myself but it doesn't seem to make me feel any more adult. And meanwhile we stay up late, talk shite, eat sweets, go to festivals, break things, have a laugh, wear stupid clothes, go broke and make total fools of ourselves on a regular basis. And it doesn't make me feel any more immature.

Seems like many people around my age are starting to realise or did long ago that there isn't some Rubicon you cross where you transform into a grown-up, somehow different and cut off from the confused kid you were before, you just go on being yourself, thinking and feeling a bit like you did as a teenager and a bit different, still trying to figure things out and make them work, still wondering if you'll be caught out or if there's something you're meant to know that you've failed to grasp, just living, understanding that you can do this thing called life and also that no-one can. Maybe it does change in some fundamental way if you become responsible for a child's life in addition to your own, such a radical alteration seems plausible. But apart from that it seems mainly a process of becoming more at ease with living, with however you are, whatever you're doing, with not having anything close to the answers, being grateful for the good things and trying to make the bad less awful, for others as well as yourself. Something like that. Maybe life gets harder as you get older, but easier to deal with, or maybe the opposite is true. At the moment I want to be quiet, be happy and get on with it.

This meandering reflection is a result of not feeling able to write adequately right now about what I have been planning to write about, which is the Olympics. The Paralympics had their opening ceremony last night, so hopefully I'll manage that post before they come to an end next Sunday, though by now I ought to know better than to make unnecessary public commitments. So for the record, that wasn't one. It's been an alright few months, stretching the definition of a season, feeling like a summer in activity if not weather. There was the graffiti jam at the Tivoli in May.


Still lots more photos to be edited for anonymity and uploaded from that event. Plus some later ones of the finished articles.

I did manage to write about the lunchtime mass cycle in the city centre, one of the events of Bike Week in June, though not about the launch of the Green Loop cycle which featured cycling over an aquaduct in Dublin city:


Who knew?

Then there was the Galway Film Fleadh in July, which merged seamlessly into the Galway Arts Festival and its biblically themed collages by David Mach, not least the fiery flood under the Ha'Penny Bridge of 'Hell - Dublin':


As well as a quite large metal clotheshanger Christ and company:


There was Leftfield at the Forbidden Fruit festival in Kilmaimham:


And Greg Palast speaking against fracking and vultures in Pearse Street:


And earlier this month was, indeed, the Olympics, to which I shall return.


Just last weekend was the Tall Ships Festival on the Liffey:


As the 'urban' part of Tall Ships, the Kings of Concrete festival moved from its longtime home at the Civic Offices to a warehouse and quayside on the Grand Canal. Some good graffiti, like this from New Zealand:


And a bloke on a BMX making urban life more fun:


Now off to a picnic in Stradbally for a taste of really-not-rural life, and doing some of the same things, differently.