You have to wait around for happy accidents.
Just the other day, I got a booking from Aer Lingus. Some flights had to be diverted to Dublin Airport and so they needed a taxi to take two people up to Belfast. Nice one, as that normally works out at €400 and, as it was being paid for by the airline, I could take my time and the passengers wouldn’t be overtly annoyed as they weren’t footing the bill.
Parking outside Terminal 1 at the beginning of spring isn’t the worst way to spend your day but it can be suffocating: the endless rows of traffic, buses breaking down all the time and the endless spillage of people from vehicles and the terminal. All of them bustling and hustling to get to an idealised situation: holiday or home. The construction work adds a layer of restrained chaos: a few diversions but no one complains as we all know that, when it’s ready, we’ll stand back and feel a sense of ownership as we saw the new terminal being built from the ground up. The concrete acting as a kind of bonding secret between those who saw it and those who built it.
And then the church as well, sitting in the middle with that weird looking concrete pillar that says ‘God is Love’ in gold metal, highlighting just how fucking grey the whole church and surrounding area is. When your view is obscured by the glass bus shelter/waiting area, you’d swear that it was a bus station thus making the golden slogan seem like some sort of strapline for a moribund bus company. Very much a relic from a different time in Irish history but it does no harm to be reminded of these things I suppose. Apparently there’s been a rise in attendance since the housing crisis. Suppose it’s nice to think that someone might be concerned about not being able to get on the property ladder.
In Drumcondra, there were moments where I could hear the birds chirping away while bustling in the freshly blooming ash and sycamore trees. It’s hard to describe but weather like that does something to me that cannot be matched by anything. Indeed, it’s amazing just how much we underrate the sunshine. I suppose it’s a kind of defence mechanism: we’re normally guaranteed mizzly rain that (quite literally) renders our hopes damp squibs so when sunshine penetrates our gloomy psyche, we’re not equipped to absorb such beauty.
Driving in that weather with tourists who seemed genuinely excited to be in Ireland adds that little spring in the step as well. They mightn’t necessarily converse with you, but it would be evident from their hand gestures and blasting jigs from their phones that they’re happy to be in Ireland. They think they’re indulging in some good humoured stereotyping and always have a look on their mugs that suggest they’ve never once considered the possibility that an Irish person might find such antics punchable offences.
So maybe it’s no bad thing that they don’t converse much. Besides, what really makes this job worth it is seeing the creeping realisation on the faces of tourists as we travel from the airport to Dublin city centre itself. All too often they’ve built up their own visions of what the place is like and you can either disabuse them of said notions or play up to it a little. It all depends on the route one takes from the airport: if I was to drive through Drumcondra, it would certainly reinforce the more positive perceptions: Georgian buildings, luscious foliage, Croke Park, James Joyce, Samantha Mumba. Whereas if I went through the tunnel, the giddy optimism turns into a kind of existential nightmare as the endless rows of sodium lights and dingy concrete make them wonder if this was what Diana experienced a few minutes before the crash.
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Being given this job from Aer Lingus was a nice way to wind up the day and meant I didn’t have to come in for a few days. Unfortunately, the job was at 11pm. Although on a good day it would take about 90 to 100 minutes to get to and from Belfast, I had been told by one of the drivers that part of the journey was closed off due to roadworks.
Driving up the motorway at that time of night is always something of an adventure for me and it’s all to do with the lights, believe it or not. We all know there’s something almost primordial in the act of travelling at night as we scour the surroundings for immediate danger and the variety of lights (be they traffic, headlights, LED) and the various patterns can make the whole thing somewhat psychedelic.
It helps to be a seasoned veteran otherwise, as I previously said with some tourists, the endless lights will drive you mad.
Also when we move into the cities with their underpasses, advertising spaces, skyscrapers and apartment blocks, the whole thing can be a sensory overload as you struggle to contemplate why people have their apartment lights on at 2am and whether such lighting is indictive of a dead city trying to mask that it’s dead or whether it’s merely a spectacle for night time folk to ensure that their primordial feelings of travelling at night are justified.
Pity that I got two miserable Nordie cunts who said fuck all the whole journey.
Christopher Owens, 2026, Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown. Down by Law Books, 2026, ISBN 9798245132884
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
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