I was in two minds last Sunday evening. My wife was taking the boys down to see their grandparents leaving me with an enviable free-house. Admittedly the thought of sitting on the couch and watching sports for 3 hours was very attractive but in the end I decided to grab the camera and zoom lens and head out in the car to take some spontaneous photos.
I have only done this twice before. The first time I drove down to Blackrock, a nice little village on the south coast of Dublin and a place where I spent a lot of my summers as a young boy with my younger cousins. The first time I wandered about and just took random snaps, trying hard to get the camera to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. Easier said than done. I inadvertently snapped some rather choice graffiti on the bridge over the railway tracks.
It just goes to show that you should pay attention to the details of what you are snapping and not just focus on the focus.. if that makes sense. Anyway the few pictures I took were OK so I was happy enough.
A month or so ago I decided to repeat the act and drove down to Dun Laoghaire, again on the south side of Dublin and a bigger place than Blackrock. It has a ferry terminal with a link to the UK port of Holyhead, a main train station, even a Burger King. A decent sized town. It also has two lovely piers, the aptly named East and West piers and they are splendid for all kinds of leisure activities such as fishing, skating, cycling, and of course good old walking. I grabbed the camera and zoom lens this time and drove down there and found a great parking space right next to the pier entrance.
Alas when I returned to the car after walking and taking photos the car was kaput. It would just not start. Turned out that the starter motor and ignition were crocked and my little jaunt to the harbour would eventually set me back just north of five hundred euros in car repair costs.
Undaunted, I decided this weekend that it would be fun to head out to take a few more snaps. This time I headed to Bray in Wicklow, the next county to the south of Dublin. I had hoped that there would be a summer fair or festival or something like that but there wasn't. Instead there was just a lot of people sitting about and strolling along the seafront and cars everywhere.
I parked and put the camera stuff over my shoulder and made my way down to the beach. The first thing I encountered was a man wearing headphones and waving a metal detector about. He seemed to be very focused on a particular area, perhaps he was helping someone out who had lost something on the beach. I headed south away from his work and passed various people hurling stones into the sea with great venom. It's usually a male thing to go to the water's edge and hurl stones into the sea and if you can find them it can be fun to skim flat stones on the water even at 40 years of age.
Moving past this group I walked along the pebble-covered beach and passed a huge poo on the sand, covered with flies. Clearly this was the work of a canine as nobody would be so bad as to do that on the beach. Nonetheless there is a rule for dog owners in Bray and this is why. Totally gross and actually quite rare to see in Ireland these days. Granted it would be nicer to have rare things like a Picasso or a vintage Rolls Royce to look at but these would probably look just as out of place on the beach as the poo. Enough about that.
There were precious few people in the water at this stage of the evening, not that it was a cold evening more that it was likely to be fairly chilly in the water at this stage of the summer. At the end of the beach I ventured up Bray head, Bray's version of that huge mountain that overlooks Rio. It has a cross on top too but it's just not that spectacular. I climbed a little but the light was already starting to fade and I wanted to be home in time for the family. I headed back down the hill past a now almost-decrepit guesthouse which still seemed to be open for business. It looked like one of those spooky old haunted places you would see on Scooby Doo or on that episode of CHiPs in season 2 (quite specific I know) where the little kid runs away on Hallowe'en and ends up hiding in a wardrobe of an abandoned place like this. I digress.
Walking back along the pavement and a little away from the shore I was intrigued by the amount of people sitting eating fish and chips or chips with something fried anyway. The smell was very powerful and wafting all along the seafront. I looked for the place where all these chips were coming from and there it was. A tiny little hut on the seafront selling all this fried food to all these happy soul-food eaters. Why not. I reckon eating at a place has the effect of burning a memory into the heart and the head through the gut. Just a theory.
About two-thirds of the way back to the car I was very taken with a group of young people down at the water's edge, one of whom was screaming. It was a kind of unintelligble excited or frantic scream and impossible to make out what she was saying. She was jumping up and down and pacing and running from side to side. At this stage lots of people had stopped to see what all the screaming was about. There about 100 metres from the shoreline was a fin protruding from the water and swimming in very straight lines from side to side parallel to the shore.
My initial reaction was 'crikey there's something in the water'. Often in Ireland the only thing you find in the water off the coast is seaweed, trash and the occasional bit of raw sewage. (Shopping trollies and couches are mostly found in rivers these days). Clearly it was not a shark as it was too small and nobody else was freaking out.
Turns out it was a dolphin and apparently (my wife tells me) they are pretty common off the coast of Ireland these days. A woman passing by pushing a wheelchair asked me if I had managed to capture it and I told her that I had not been quick enough with the camera. Turns out I was and one of the snaps I took shows the fin sticking up out of the water. Granted it's miles away and not that clear but it's a fin nonetheless. Success. Pictures from Bray were OK too so a decent sunday night's effort with the camera too.
Roll on next weekend.
I hope all (optimistic I know) that are reading this are well and in good spirits and that life is treating you well right now.
Best wishes until the next time.
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