Posts from — July 2010

When I left Ireland to go travelling in 2006, Ireland’s property boom was at its giddy height. People were shitting themselves that if they didn’t buy now, they’d never own a house and end up living under a bridge or, worse yet, with their parents. They were racing each other to get on the property ladder, outbidding the next dupe for grab-bag cardboard box houses in satellite towns a poxy commute from Dublin. (You can see these developments now in Guardian features on Ireland’s ghost-towns – bus tours are imminent). I had no money, and no intention of trying to stretch what I had to buy a malodorous little hutch on the fringe of society, valued at its weight in gold.

So I filled my backpack, my girlfriend did the same, and we headed for South America. Of course, we couldn’t resist the lure of the ladder for long. In Bariloche, Argentina, we did the numbers. And we bought a tent (pictured). Here’s an edited version of our bitchy little missive home.

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After two months on the road, we were beginning to feel like escape artists. Our friends are back home, joining Ireland´s fastest-growing club, Club Property Ladder, and we are off here with nothing to our name but two backpacks so full they are screaming for mercy. But we got nervous.

So we did the mature thing. We invested in a home. Nothing flash, you understand; with the market being the way it is we first-time buyers can´t be choosy. We just reckoned that now is the time to get our foot on the ladder, so that in three years’ time we can trade up for an extra three square feet, three feet nearer Dublin´s city centre, and feel really smug, and maybe even rub it in the noses of people who were a few months later than us and can´t afford to make the jump just yet. Peasants.

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For the last few years I’ve been a solid lurker on the boards.ie photography forum, which is a profound source of photographic help, information, inspiration and the rest.

Rain from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Marooned as my garden office temporarily became an island, I got out the camera and started shooting out the door in frustration.

Good thing I didn’t have a gun to hand. Nerdy details over the fold.

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There’s an aul saying that football isn’t life and death – it’s much more important than that. It’s a lazy cliché, but with the post-mortem of Africa’s first world cup, many will toot their horn, saying that football could be responsible for breathing new life into the continent.

In a bar on Friday night, a friend told me how he was amazed at the ubiquity of football when he was working in Ghana, where every flat patch of dust became a soccer pitch, and anything solid and spherical was used as a ball. Football was everywhere, a complete leveller.

The picture above is a genuine African life-and-death soccer situation. The flat patch was, at one stage, the bottom of a dam near the village of Kilema, a coffee & banana plantation area on the lower slopes of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The dam was drained after a tragic death where a young boy fell into the waters and drowned, and a separate, safer, area was set aside further uphill for storing water.

The dam floor had been flattened by sediment, and after drainage it became a grassy, level clearing. What was abandoned due to death came alive again as soon as a set of posts were set up, and every evening we were there, the old dam would fill with kids playing soccer until the light faded.  The ball was knackered, the leather worn to scrubby suede, and turning up with a puncture kit and a pump made a Californian friend of mine a local hero.

That’s all I got on this topic, I’m no soccer fan. But I am a fan of Jessica Hiltout’s marvellous video series created ahead of the World Cup. One is embedded here. Go find the rest.

Joy Is Round from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.