Ireland day 0763. Tuesday 31 October 2023- Dublin Meetings *

Ireland day 0763. Tuesday 31 October 2023- Dublin Meetings

Today’s summary	Went into Dublin for a couple of meetings in the morning. Returned to the flat in the afternoon and went on a short walk along the coast. More Spanish homework in the evening (but there’s no class as it’s half term). Val still in London
Today’s weather	Mostly dry and cloudy with some bright sun in the morning. Light easterly wind. Appx 12c

Today’s overview location (The grey mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Park and coast

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

One of the disadvantages of having a job – albeit a very temporary one, and one which hasn’t even officially started yet – is that you have to go to meetings. My first today was at 10 am in Dublin, which meant getting organised and not hanging around drinking cups of tea. Fortunately all the trains were running normally and more or less on time, so I didn’t leave the flat until after 9 and was still there early. The meeting itself went well and it was quite interesting to re-enter the world of business discussions, after a relatively long absence. Val, by the way and in case you were wondering, is still in London sorting out a few bits of admin related to our recent house sale. She will be back tomorrow (Storm Ciaran permitting!)

My second meeting was actually a webinar. So I had packed my laptop and decided to dial in from the EPIC centre, where there is a large hall that I have visited a few times in the past, and where there are lots of tables and chairs that people use to hold ad-hoc get togethers. You can see the centre in the banner image at the top of the blog. It was perfect for my webinar as there’s good free wifi, and lots of cafés where you can get a cup of coffee to help the whole thing run a bit more smoothly. The webinar itself was extremely useful – so many thanks to Roger for suggesting it.

Once the meetings were out of the way, I ambled back to Connolly and was fortunate enough to catch a non-stop train in Malahide departing just a minute after I rocked up at the station. So I was quickly back in the flat and enjoying the microwave ready-meal that I had picked up half price in Tesco last night.

As soon as I had dined, I headed out to get a bit of a leg stretch which felt very welcome after having been cooped up on trains and in meeting rooms for the first part of the day. And now I’m back, as soon as this blog is finished I’m going to do a bit more Spanish – there’s no class tonight as it’s half term, but I have a monster load of homework to do and I’m still struggling with it.

¡Hasta luego!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Confounding my (low) expectations, the weekend’s engineering works do appear to have finished on time and the railway was running normally today. Hopefully it will also mean slightly less disturbed nights from now on too	Between meetings I dropped into the National Gallery to take a quick look at the new Sarah Purser exhibition. It’s quite small, but well laid out

It’s Halloween today so spooks were out in abundance on my walk this afternoon	Still quite a lot of colour in the flowerbeds even though it’s almost November. There hasn’t been any frost yet, though

I like to walk out through the demesne and then along the Swords road as far as the Centra shop on the Coast Road. You can get a decent cup of tea there and dink it as you walk back along the lagoon shoreline	The deposit of flotsam in the hedge suggests that the tide has recently been quite a lot higher – possibly as much as 1m higher – than at present. I had noticed that the moon is pretty full at the moment, which would mean that we are experiencing Spring tides – which explains the high watermark

Oscar keeping an eye on things from his perch in Merrion Square this morning