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I live behind the workshop

December 14th, 2011 · 1 Comment · all hail the king

I am currently sitting in my messy apartment, filled with half-empty packing cases, plastic bags with clothes for charity shops and dismantled bookshelves and again curse myself for moving in winter. But it seems I have to stick to it – next week I’m getting a car, will pack all my belongings, board a ferry and will say goodbye to Ireland for good. Here’s a short text I wrote about aforementioned apartment, one of the best places I lived in, so far.

cats

I live behind the workshop. To get there, I have to unlock the front door that was set unto its hinges in the year when the French started guillotining aristocratic heads, with the lower part of the brass letter box flap almost completely erased by 219 years of letters slipping through. I walk through the corridor, past the fin-de-siecle pantry where the tenants collect the post and past the 1930s bust, either a relative of the landlord or a find in a bric-a-brac shop on the quays. Descending three steps, I open the door to the workshop, a longish room filled with old wooden tiles, metal shelves filled with boxes full of screws, nails and bolts, disused fans and hairdryers, mirrors, wooden wine crates, paint-splattered paint pots and dusty cutlery. There’s a small path through this cemetery of DYI, which I follow to another door that leads to my yard. On three sides are the rising grey backsides of Georgian Dublin, and in front of me a gate leads to the small lane behind my house. To my right, there’s a yellow wall, covered with overgrowth from the neighbours hedge and with flowerpots in different colours in front of it. Some days, there are some stray cats from the empty house down the lane lurking through the leaves and flowers. On the left is my home, an apartment that has once been the servant kitchen and the coal shed at a time there were still servants around. It’s a nice place with wooden flooring and a low ceiling with roof-lights, so I can hear the rain and the footsteps of the cats when I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes, there’s also the crunching sound of the black cat devouring a pigeon behind the flowers.

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 lik™ // Dec 14, 2011 at 11:08 pm

    Happy for the priviledge to have been at this sweet place!

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