Ireland day 0864. Friday 09 February 2024- Birdsong *

Ireland day 0864. Friday 09 February 2024- Birdsong

Today’s summary	Had a pre-meeting Teams with my client’s senior leadership team then spent the rest of the afternoon re-working my slides for the Board presentation. Managed to fit in a walk in the evening and was struck by the vocality of the birds tweeting away as night fell, in the relative calm of the Árd Na Mara estate.
Today’s weather	Mostly calm and dry, but heavily overcast. Light to moderate easterly wind. Appx 7c

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): Birdsong walk in Ard na Mara

Commentary

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

Today, work came back to bite me – a bit.

I had a review Teams meeting scheduled at 12:00 to go through my Board presentation with my client’s Senior Leadership team. The meeting went broadly well, though as you might expect, lots of helpful suggestions for improvement were made. I spent the afternoon working out how to incorporate them, without turning the whole thing into a camel designed by committee. In the end, by 5pm I was satisfied with it, and sent it off again for further review. The good thing is that I was able to do everything from the flat, so I didn’t have to waste time driving over to the office. Let’s hope any further modifications are straightforward from now on.

Once the work was safely despatched, and since I was already sitting at my desk, I thought I might as well start to tackle the mountain of Spanish homework that we have all been sent. Actually, once I settled into it. it was less daunting than I initially thought, and I’d got the bulk of it done within an hour. So, at last, after an entire day spent sitting inside, I was free.

Tonight I decided to use my freedom to walk out to the west of Malahide, through the “newly discovered” (to me) Árd Na Mara estate, and on to Centra at the end of the Yellow Walls Road. As soon as I got into the estate, I noticed something strange. It was quiet. No trains, no planes, and even the traffic on the Dublin Road was just a distant buzz. All this silence meant that I could hear birds singing – quite a cacophony actually, and a real “evening chorus”. The winter’s counterpoint to the dawn chorus of early summer perhaps. Anyway, whatever it was, it was delightful to hear.

I walked back along the Broadmeadow estuary, and the water was mirror-calm. A marked contrast to yesterday when the easterly wind was blowing up everything into a foam-flecked frenzy. I extended the walk a little so I could pick up some milk at Tesco before returning to the flat – and to my delight (but my waistline’s dismay) I discovered a load of sell-by date biscuits were being sold off cheap tonight. I obviously couldn’t let purchasing opportunity like that go to waste, so filled up my basket with a selection of a few of the biggest bargains, alongside the milk that I had actually gone into the shop for.

Weighed down by my sugary purchases, I staggered back to the flat, made dinner (it’s lough-Avalla beef casserole that I had stored in the freezer) ands settled down to eat my biscuits (well – I did exercise some restraint and only had two). Delicious.

Anyway, tomorrow’s another day so I need to sign off now so I can figure out how to handle it.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


My feline friend	Entering the Árd Na Mara estate – it’s surprising how quickly the noise of the Dublin Road drops away once you turn the corner at the bottom

Snowdrops seem to be popping up everywhere – very pretty	In the gap between the Killeeen and Seabury estates, with the Gaybrook Stream “valley” in the shrubs to the right

This is the Centra shop at the end of the Yellow Walls Road, where I like to pick up a cup of tea on a sunny day	Looking up Old Street from Strand Street, with St Sylvester’s church spire in the distance

The Broadmeadow lagoon was exceptionally calm this evening, giving these fine skyscapes the ideal mirror for their artistry