The Distance

Sam went to a meeting, culminating in a few glasses of wine, at a work colleague's house in Killiney, so she asked if I'd come and collect her. 

I hadn't been to Killiney in a while, and I thought I'd take the dogs for a walk on the beach; the daily dog-walking being mostly the first but occasionally the second bird to be killed with the same stone (though whether it's sleeping dogs, dogs in the street or birds in the bush, they really don't need to be slain at all). 

I think I'd only driven through Killiney once since the lockdown, and I'd noticed in passing that there were new bollards on Vico Road cordoning off some of the parking spaces. Surely not all though. 

When I got there I realised that yes, all the spaces were gone, perhaps to avoid another confrontations between cops trying to do their jobs and conspiracy-minded eejits with video cameras and microphones (never mind if you don't get what I'm talking about; you're better off not knowing).

I parked around the corner and headed off down towards Colimore harbour, and found a little park I never knew existed, with some guys fishing off the big granite rocks near the sea, and others in a little group under the trees. A smoky smell on the air, as if someone had lit a campfire somewhere. I was hoping to somehow get to the beach this way, but of course it wasn't possible. I headed back uphill, then crossed the road, both dogs completely confused I imagine, wondering where this fool was dragging them. But I had spotted a public gateway to a path further uphill, that wound curiously around a little granite bluff, leading to a paved area at the top with a bench, a kind of viewing place I suppose, but it was essentially a cul-de-sac, leading nowhere. Interesting to know it's there though, a little amoral high ground with a view (I think) of the bay. 

Back around the corner then, past the car, and onto Vico, in the hope that a little gateway that I'd spotted earlier might lead somewhere interesting.

It did, though it was another cul-de-sac swimming baths, or more like shelters similar to Seapoint, another nook I'd never known existed (good to return to and take a first, late-summer swim). My acquaintance with the intimate topology of the most expensive suburb in Ireland was improving. I headed back up the steep narrow path (leaning to avoid a passing youth and whatever coronated micro-droplets he might be exhaling) then back on the narrow pavement towards where they'd installed the bollards. Once again though, I spied another public path, this time heading up Killiney Hill itself. So up we went, and came out on what I call Billionaire's Row, the highest houses on the sea-facing side of the hill, many of them gazing panoramically towards the horizon, or over Dublin Bay towards Howth. 

Apart from all these envious prospects, what I noticed in Killiney was what I've noticed elsewhere: that life is in some ways very much back to 'normal'. If you'd been quantum-entangled back in early March, before the lockdown became inevitable, and deposited here and now in Dublin or Bray, you might not notice at first that anything was up. Of course there are many businesses still closed and the skies, while grumbling with the odd plane, are mostly still free of the cat's cradle of vapour trails. But traffic is back on the roads as if it had never left, and most people who are out and about don't look like they're braving the smog in Tokyo. 

The various distancing techniques have stepped back, become distanced themselves. Especially among younger people, but plenty of people my age too. It's strange, but perhaps not so strange. The virus hasn't packed its beach gear and taken a break. It is still on the job, doing precisely what it doing before. This is the reality. But then, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton, 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.'