darkness on the edge of town

I get Friday night euphoria, maybe as a habit from coasting to the end of an all-nighter and wanting to burn up all my remaining energy before the crash. In Westport, it's strange, because I don't know enough people to find company whenever I want it, and I don't want to lean too hard on the people I'm getting to know.

Coming off a week where I doubted my future here and then secured it as home again until the end of February, I felt a surge of love for the town and a surge of premature sadness after coming close to packing up and leaving it. I wrapped up warm and walked out to the quay, to sit drinking takeaway tea and watch the harbour channel lights blinking red and green below the stars.

I like the kind of bravery that's about stamina, about coping with change and loneliness and knotted inward challenges. It was never clear in Dublin how much the ambient threat, especially living in the Liberties, hemmed that desire in. I did walk through the city alone at night, walking just to see the streets and pass by people as they lived around me, but the threat is so much lower here that I can sit alone and isolated at night and know it's not asking for trouble. Loneliness seems very little about actually being alone, and more about feeling anchorless and cut off - I felt the same loneliness surrounded by friends and in a relationship as I do six months after moving to a town where I knew nobody. It's not a shortcoming.

I am an embarrassment when I love something or someone. It's frequent but it's never hyperbole: it's a rush of sentiment and a giant, messy, throbbing heart open to the world, and things are wrong when that stops.

In town, walking up into a vertical row of streetlights and buildings, nobody passes me without saying hello; I pass nobody without saying hello.

I came here thinking of it as escape and recovery, maybe recuperation - time to be by myself and step away from having my days full and from chasing heartbreak. It felt like anything I might care about would end as a lesson in "this is why we can't have nice things", and that was true at the start but it's changed. Having the chance to think about the rest of my life as a continuum rather than as a peak followed by decline or chasing to meet milestones, I am now wondering if this might be more than a place I visit, and I realise I'll get to choose.

I walked out to the quay listening to M. Ward, music that (aside from She & Him) seems like it was made for me and fits in a niche in my heart carved with just it in mind. Poison Cup is better the four-hundredth time than the first (A sip or a spoonful won't do - I want it all). To Go Home hit me in the gut tonight. I walked out to the quay with a surge of emotion burning off like I was putting it to use; I walked out to the quay walking hard.

Maybe just one more - Chinese Translation. And I said, what do you do with the pieces of a broken heart? and how can a man like me remain in the light? and if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

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Greendale has the most amazing map, the answer to the love letter to Westport I wrote in September/October. It's an enormous, beautiful thing and I think it'll be crawling deeper into my heart for a while. I think you need to see it.

baby strike

I spent August knitting furiously for two pending babies. The cardigans are both the Debbie Bliss Classic Baby Cardigan, both in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino. I don't have a secret raging brand loyalty - it's lovely yarn to knit with and comes in less anaemic colours than most baby lines, and her patterns are super-clear.

The cardigan for Charlie, my cousin and her husband's baby, is pistachio green and features a bizarro fuck-up on my part which made it sort of v-necked. I panicked about time and finished it, making the buttonholes to suit, and it's a little embarrassing but at least it wasn't a third arm.

My colleagues' baby Maud was born about a week later and her cardigan is a gorgeous deep red, because I reckoned her parents would be forgiving about the deviation from baby palette. I try, at least, to learn from my mistakes, and I managed to make this one button to the top without any unplanned distortion.

Baby knitting is super satisfying because a jumper takes less time and yarn than an adult scarf, but I'm hoping there's a respite in people's good news until I can find a new favourite pattern in the teeny-wee category.

obsessions make my life _____ and my work _____

I keep going back to looking at the winning design for the commemorative Dutch 5 Euro coin, for which the brief concerned 'the Netherlands and architecture'.

It's clever, but I'm not sure. Architecture represented as a list of names seems more like celebrity culture than relating to the built environment, especially if - as the artist's description mentioned - popularity in Google determined the name order. Sure, someone might be intrigued and go looking into, say, Nathalie de Vries just because they're intrigued by the name, but being interested or affected by the work and then finding out who's responsible seems more interesting than cementing Rem Koolhaas as a star.

The Queen's portrait also seems to suffer the same fate as any image made up of sparse points, which isn't too flattering. I love the idea of the books and their edges forming the outline of the country, but the books as a representation seems even further into celebrity and unrelated, external validation.

(It did remind me how many Dutch architects make work I like, though.)

I wonder whether it's ever possible to make a successful icon - not because architecture is any more special or complex, necessarily, than the other things distilled into a symbol. The architecture of big names and awards is made up of photographs, sometimes rendering, and maybe even drawings, and those images come to represent the buildings for the huge percentage of the world who will not make it to the buildings or spaces themselves. It's a pity that the image would supplant the thing itself, the environment constructed for its users and inhabitants and passers-by and passers-through, and reducing it further in this way loses even the small remaining connection, like band names written on the canvas schoolbags of kids who can't hear, like food as menus that will never be tasted.

The reverse faces of Euro banknotes are just as reductive, though. Styles, periods, names and rules, like a frozen lesson in art appreciation that fails to engage and stays as an aesthetic elite, beauty for highbrow smalltalk's sake.

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Photo by rotkehlchen

Another project involving Euro coins which has been on my mind lately is Sagmeister's obsessions make my life worse and my work better. It's my favourite project in THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE SO FAR, and its fate is almost as interesting as the piece itself.