A Midday Stroll Through The City Centre

An Urban Constraint

There’s an ease these days when crossing the street the once busy traffic in the middle of the week is safe and quiet physically distancing easily acquired

I hear seagulls swarming shadows of white over Cork’s River Lee I see plenty parking spaces all strangely free I wonder at our world becoming uneasily discreet

Discovering new places with time on my feet I behold empty bubbles without any clatter — failed attempts of a hospitality industry still gasping in a science-fictiony world on the day after

The sunlight thankfully familiar gentle and bright, warms everything colourful in sight blotting the cold, I bathe in its banter and relish the pause from the icy wind’s bite

In the window of a shut-down department store I spot an image of me as a child advertising Christmas and more —  ‘normal’ you might say but not in the Ireland of my younger day when my normal was always different

I count the people — one to 12 in all walking along both sides of the main shopping street with most shops closed other than basics and food we need to eat there’s little to buy and nothing to compare do I hear a silent collective sigh?

By chance, I look down and notice under my feet a plaque — on which unheeded, I had tread so many times — dedicated on concrete to the launch in 1841 of our once locally printed Cork Examiner, now nationally known as The Examiner

A masked visit to a ghost-town department store where among the cordoned off clothes racks I espy the storage box I need — now deemed an essential buy And add another essential, a scented candle to brighten up my night and haunt away the frost from my exposed skylight

My only drollery this day is with a little elderly man whose presence is announced with the tap of his stick before he appears around the corner I offer him his right of way “Thank you, love,” he beams “It’s mightily cold today” — and I agree and pretend not to see his chocolate ice cream

Getting home I pile all my shoes into the box*, place my candle on my desk under the skylight and smile — job done and a reason again to have been out and about to avoid a melt-down in our third fully-blown national lockdown

*Though I’d sworn to avoid buying plastic in 2021… I forgot. So this box will remain with me ‘till the day I die’… a reminder.