For me, it has been a year of high cobalt skies, a universe of cloud and ocean, cold and vivid colours, boundaries, borders and demarcation. It is as if the days have swirled past, like pages magically turning in a Hollywood epic while I, as its central character, flew to the top of its spine and watched the story unfolding. I wonder if this is because I have turned a leaf, a corner, entered a new age of few imperatives other than space and pages, words and fiction and the fear, unease and guilt that accompanies the days of a writer (particularly the novelist – I find the poet in me more languid) or the real world has taken leave of its axis.

This year has divided me into extremes. I have been either cooped up and immobile with my leg up (after my hip operation at the start of 2016), or on the move. Since April, every month, sometimes two or three times a month, I have found myself in the long, rounded, high rise glass tunnels of Terminal One, walking, tugging, running betwixt and between faces, places and people,  on my way or on my way back, on the conveyor belt, the travellator, or escalator, up and down steps between Dublin and London, across and back between ‘home’ and home, between mother and daughter, friend, brother, son, husband, Brixton, Clapham, Kentish Town, Galway, Limerick, Manchester, Ipswitch not to mention the delights of Athens, and Marrakesh. Now, in the last month, I make the final journey of the year: another move home, the move from Gowna to town, from Drumbriste House to The Bungalow situated on the corner of two roads in Swellan, with a high suburban hedge, under street lamps, across from hundreds of other houses, a short walk from the shops, pubs, library. Another Home from Home.

It is odd. All of these journeys have been dependent on me making them but I feel separate to them, as if I might be one of my own characters, not quite real, still coming into being. I think this is partly due to the real world being almost virtually unreal. Its pages may be turning fast, wars, Isis, corruption, Brexit, Trump, but despite my own fervent activity, my journeys, my travels, I am feeling a silent stillness, a separateness. It feels like time is at a precipice. From next week, I will watch the pages turn, (both real and fictional), snug in my bungalow, and will begin to unpack the hundred brown taped cardboard boxes (12” X 12” X 18”). Visitors are welcome. I cannot guarantee my state of mind but I can guarantee tea, elderflower wine, and cake. Together, we can toast the characters of 2017 or curse them, whichever.

Trumped By Nature

When I finally closed my eyes to leave the twilight zone

Midnight had turned to 5am

Rectangles and squares had turned solid red

Angular, angry, abrasive

I could not see the swamps and seasons that shimmered beneath

nor the mists and oceans, prairie and land

It was difficult to see that sentience existed

people worked and lived

passion, vigour, reason existed

that these geometric shapes of inspiration and precision

were shuddering containers of human emotions

I awoke to my soft light of Irish day

morning white, grass green, sun rays

ridden roughshod by my Horseman and Scream

thick with fearful swirls of oil and edge

spiralling colour in mad descent

But, hard to believe, puppy dogs and rainbows emerged

I decided to walk, to think, to mind

to unravel, discourse, tick tock.

Out in the bog, my dog, Mary Poppins, and I

came across a puppy who wanted to play, jump, leap, chase

I watched his scampering bliss

Ignorance and happiness

Taking place beneath scudding clouds of grey and white, skies of blue and black, earth of gold and brown, arched by indigo, violet, red, orange, yellow, blue, green

It was my moment of why

While America tried to make herself great again

Do you know that feeling of dread when your skin crawls and your mind shouts NOooo? You shake with trepidation; your stomach reacts with bile but your moral compass is set and what has to be done forces your feet forward and propels your body in the right direction; you resist every taut, resistant hair in every screaming follicle, and you step into the fray, face the onslaught, the strangers, the danger, with heavy heart? Do you know that feeling?

I remember when I was three going to the beach for the first time, stepping down jagged, rocky steps of a rising cliff that towered into vast white cold skies,  my legs being scratched on clumps of heather, my tiny flip flops flailing against the sharp stones. I remember the rocks that lay like a black wet dinosaur, its skin cracked with crevices, brimming with water, turgid, slippery, slimy, green seaweed floating in briny pools,  scuttling crabs, barnacles clinging, cold winds wrapping themselves around my shivering body; reaching the cold expanse of damp, brown, solid grains of compacted sand; the noisy, grey tipped waves rolling closer and closer,  rushing in to overwhelm me, swallow me up, stiffen me in its smell of salt, standing, terrified, on the shore, cold water frothing over my toes.

My first day of school, I remember standing in the door of the classroom; the hubbub of voices, the blue of the screams, yellow taunts flying through the air, the white dry smell of chalk and blackboard tickling my nose, the scraping of chairs, chaos clattering, the wriggling hands inching up through the air to answer questions, a mangle of colours leaking from  the walls, and the safe quiet of day on the other side of the window.

Going to my first job interview, I remember the surprise of day light, the blur of buildings,  the stretch of electricity poles, the houses, gardens, shops flashing past after the train emerged from the tunnel into a strange world of suburbia. I hear the roar of huge aircraft and watch them, with their wheels lowered, criss-cross above me on their way to the airport and I wonder about the inevitable.

I remember leaving my home in rural Cavan one night  in brilliant moonshine, the shadows of myself and the bushes and trees looming bright black in the yard; turning and seeing my children silhouetted and laughing, their faces bright with pyjamas, TV and cheese strings and my reluctant heart getting into my car to drive miles and miles of dark country lanes, my headlights unraveling hawthorn, sycamores, snaking along the border roads, the moon now behind  clouds, driving back and forth across yellow road markings (the Republic), across white road markings, (The North), driving in bandit country, deserted, passing dark shapes of houses with one light on until I see the two cathedral spires of my destination cast against the Milky Way far away from where my children are safe in their shrouds of dark under duvets.

I remember the Old People’s Home where I travelled to read poetry last summer, the room full of dirty grey denier stockings on the withered stumpy legs of un-remembered old ladies slumped in their high backed chairs wearing green stained olive and navy cotton cardigans, splashed with food from today’s dinner of cauliflower cheese, (it reminded me of semen stains), their twisted faces lolled useless on wrinkled necks and shoulders, their gnarled, vein exposed hands, lay brittle in their laps, their grey hair hanging in streaks of grease and my words poised reluctantly on the tip of my tongue about to be rendered meaningless, uncared for, but I release them all the same hoping they find resonance.

I made all these journeys with a dreadful sense of dread.

But now dread has disappeared and I miss it. This morning I woke up to find my head was shaved. I realise that without my hair I can do nothing, go nowhere and I now understand the significance of dread. In dread there is direction.