A Grand Canal.

 

Bliss

Sometimes I walk into work along the Grand Canal. It’s always a pleasant walk with lots to see. I look forward to walking over the lock gates and checking in on Paddy Kavanagh, burgled of youth. It’s Monet leafy, tree lined with an assortment of bird life. Ducks, swans, small little black ones with red beaks. Gulls and pigeons are banned. The path is uneven which often catches out that geeky girl who reads as she walks, somehow. How do people do that? Down at Leeson street bridge there’s a few winos, the intellectual type, a few ducks hanging around for bread, if only they knew.

Occasionally you see a barge or two rising in the lock, middle aged Germans slowly emerging into view, herbal tea in hand (which will receive a perfectly aimed arc of piss from above when they attempt to negotiate the stretch of canal in Bluebell). They’ll feel the bump and scrape of shopping trolleys and traffic cones. But they’ll make it and emerge into the plains of Kildare and the kingfishers shooting along in front. When they  point west, they’ll see the sun set golden under a hump back bridge in the distance, at the long end of a narrow watery line. In Monasterevin they will pass over the river Barrow where the canal traverses the river in an aquaduct, an early flyover. As the canal crosses the bog of Allen, it’s actually floating over it.

The canal is slow. 4mph. Walking pace. Time slows down like it’s a narrow secret channel through the present time. Approaching a town from the water is an entirely different experience to approaching by road. You’re days from places not hours. You’re different, you’re off the boats. Pass on the left, early on the rudder, dead slow, mind the reeds. A walker overtakes you on the tow path as you sit reading up on the bow… “Oh that’s a good chapter” he says.

Slow down, slow down. It’s a grand canal.