Back of The Queue

NB
Apologies. I've done it again, switched images. The witchy girl is now a secondary image, at the bottom of the text.

After helping put the wean to bed (reading him four books now, including Where The Wild Things Are, which I am not at all sure he follows), I was all settled to chill in front of the box for awhile. But I had this image in the back of mind, long queues of umbrellas, the toadstools of the faithful, standing in the steady rain. Not something that happens every night. I had to see.

I drove up to the local shopping centre with its tiny bookshop, to check if they were really everywhere. They were. There was something intimate about that gathering, something of a school/family outing, that made me reluctant to set up my tripod. I was going to head home again then thought what the hell, a run downtown was a matter of 10 minutes or so.

So I headed for the book-supermarkets, Waterstones and Hodges Figgis, which are opposite each other on Dawson St. The place was jammed, with lines of patient taxis and cars parked on every available space; I think the clampers realised they would probably risk being assaulted by furious mums and dads, or hexed. Nobody minded me; the atmosphere had something of a slightly dampened carnival. It could have been there was also a photographer from the Irish Times moving along the queue. It was a fair-sized one, given the weather. It snaked from the doors of Waterstones, up Dawson Street for 20 yards or so, then around the corner into a side road where it eventually curled up among the wheelie bins in a back alley.

I entered the queue through an enclosed arched walkway from South Frederick St., a favourite sleeping spot for homeless people. There were two of them there in sleepingbags, seemingly unbothered by the stream of people lapping their bedroom. One of them, a sober enough young man, asked me what it was all about. He seemed bemused by my explanation and went back to sleep. Before heading for the other end of the street (where I snapped THIS happy-to-be-blipped woman), I shot a few frames from the arch, one of which is main blip.