I wake up to the screams of seagulls circling over my house. Even though I live in a grey, old area of the city with no body of water anywhere to be seen, the voices of the seagulls remind me that Dublin is a city by the sea. I check the alarm, and as usual I’m awake before it’s supposed to go off. I drag my body out of the bed and into the shower, where the mixture of cold water and Rodrigo y Gabriela on the stereo finally wakes me up. The first tea of the day then makes me feel ready for another day at the office, in a place where you can only see the mountains but not the sea. I leave my house on St. Peter’s Road, where a badge on a neighbours house reminds me that James Joyce lived here for two years of his live. He and his family moved to Blackrock from here as far as I know, near the beach. A yellow double-decker bus gets me to the office, and after switching on my PC I try to write in some kind of modern marketing speech for a couple of hours.

A colleague of mine has sent a postcard from Thailand. She’s staying in a small hut on the beach, she writes. The last time I stood on a beach I saw the Milky Way, something I’ve never seen before. I had drunk more Amstel than I had planned to in the small bar near the camping ground, and before returning to my tent I wanted to take a walk along the beach to clear my head a bit. But my walk did not take me far. I stopped on the crest of the dike behind the beach, baffled by the image of millions of stars forming a clearly visible band of light in the night sky. And so, for the next 3 hours, I just sat there on the dike, my bare feet dug into the soft sand, gazing at the incredible spectacle that the light of so many stars were performing just for me, while listening to the comforting sound of the waves breaking on the beach below me. And tried to store all those images I saw somewhere deep inside of me.

I switch off my PC, leave the office, and a similar yellow double-decker bus takes me home, driving along Dublin’s biggest graveyard on the way. After coming home, I run along the banks of the canal, from my house to the Brendan Behan-statue and back, passing clusters of beer-drinking men in tracksuits on benches and elderly ladies walking their dogs. After a shower and dinner, consisting of a sandwich and coleslaw, I try to write a bit (I still need to get my head around the second assignment of my travel-writing course) and drink an Amstel from the fridge. Before heading to bed I read a couple of pages from “The Beach”, and in the last conscious moment before falling asleep I hope that I’ll dream of stars and the sound of the sea.

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