Ireland day 0238. Tuesday 24 May 2022- Routine

Today’s summary	Val was at work and I spent the day cleaning the flat, finishing a paper for the Geol Soc, shopping and then walking down to Clare hall Tesco via the Castle demesne on a lovely sunny afternoon
Today’s weather	Moderate cloud but long sunny intervals and bright blue sky. Light westerly wind. Brief shower around lunchtime. About 16C

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The green line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Clare Hall via Demesne

Commentary

I do like being busy. When you’re doing a point-to-point walking trip, like the Wicklow Way which we finished (for the time being) yesterday, it’s not hard to create a sense of order about your day, and you don’t even need to think about being busy. There’s so much to do and look at as you progress, it all just happens automatically. When you get back, though, unless you pitch yourself straight into work (as Val did this morning), it can feel a bit anticlimactic. I was a bit worried that this might be the case with me today, but in fact it wasn’t.

For a start there was a lot of post-holiday catching up to do. Three loads of washing, stuff to be put away, and then the whole flat to be hoovered (again). I thought that the place might have stayed a bit cleaner, seeing as we have been away quite a lot lately, but sadly it hadn’t. We seem to be suffering a bit of a fluff pandemic at the moment – it accumulates behind the door to our bedroom, for some reason, but I have no idea why it decides to go there, nor of where it comes from.

Next up on the list was completion of the paper I’d promised for the Geological Society. I’ve updated it with comments from Geological Survey Ireland and sent it off for publication. I should warn you it’s a fairly lightweight account of the history of the Survey, rather than a learned tome, but if you’d like to read it, click the button below:

Geology Paper

Anyway, with the routine tasks out of the way, I treated myself to a quick walk down to the shops. Annoyingly, they hadn’t got half the things I wanted – like a Thermos flask to replace the one I left in the B&B yesterday, and a new pair of cheap reading glasses to replace the ones I sat on by mistake. So that meant that I would have to embark on a more significant shopping expedition – down to the big Tesco down at Clare Hall.

In fact this was probably a good thing. At first, I thought I’d get the car out and drive. But with the environment seemingly more imperilled at every turn, and with fuel prices going through the roof, I decided against it and exercised the walk-and-bus option instead (Dublin has recently reduced bus fares by 20%, so it made even more economic sense too).

And as soon as I got out and headed across the Castle demesne in pursuit of the R107 to North Dublin, I realised that the day had turned out to be unexpectedly lovely. The same bright blue skies and vivid green trees that we’ve been enjoying for the last week or two, but with the bonus of a couple more degrees on the temperature scale, making it feel altogether a lot more comfortable. Especially for those of us still determinedly wearing shorts.

The trip to Clare Hall turned out to be improbably successful. I got some new reading glasses – though at €8.50 they were a bit more expensive than I had wanted (and they make me look like Joe 90, if you are a fan of Supermarionation). And perhaps more importantly, they also sold Thermos (or Thermos-like) flasks and at €6.50 they were cheaper than I had remembered – nicely offsetting the glasses uplift. Finally I managed to get some half-price mince, so my triumph was complete.

Clutching my new found wealth, I staggered out of the mirrored glassiness of Clare Hall and across the road to the bus stop. Ah – the good old no. 42. So many happy memories. Although this time it was warm and sunny at the bus stop and I only had to wait 5 minutes till it came.

Exhausted by all this activity, I jumped on the bus and promptly fell asleep, waking up with a jolt just in time to get off at St Sylvester’s school. And at this point I’m going to finish, as Val and I need to go out to do some most important expeditionary work on OBB 28. If you read the captions below, you will soon find out what it is and why it’s so important. Back tomorrow!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


The view couldn’t possibly be more English. Except, of course, it isn’t.	I absolutely love blue skies and sunshine. It’s like ingesting an entire jar full of multivitamins.

Almost looks like high summer, out in the middle of the demesne.	*Colourful Red Valerian (Centranthus ruber). I don’t think this is the same speciaes as herb valerian*

Spot the difference	Tesco did indeed have replacement Thermos flasks – identical in every way to the one I lost except that they are branded “Tesco” not “Thermos”. And at €6.50 they were actually less expensive than I expected

Screw up your eyes and get out your reading-glasses. This notice appeared on the door to our apartments last night – basically it is saying that we are going to be kept awake all night on Friday and Saturday while Iarnród Éireann do “Intensive bridge Maintenance” on bridge OBB28. I think this is the bridge down by the lagoon – the one that links the station to the Broadmeadow causeway. It is also the one with the water pouring out of the stonework and I’ve been wondering for some time if it was structurally safe. I was actually going to write to Iarnród Éireann about it but – hopefully – they have already spotted the problem and this work may be in place to fix it. Should be worth losing 48 hours sleep for, anyway.