Adult thought … should measure itself more honestly against the darkness and difficulty of human life and without losing sight of the irrational roots of this life. -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

I live on St. Mary’s Terrace, Stoneybatter. It is more a square than a terrace and there are twelve houses in it. My girlfriend and I live with our dog Gypsy in No. 2. Our house, which we rent, was built about a hundred years ago. It is constructed with artisan brick, has a pitched roof and timber first floor with two upstairs bedrooms. The rear bedroom is used as a study. We dismantled the bed and lifted the mattress up so that it leans against the wall, and I sit at my desk, in this room, which has good light, every day, reading and writing. The other bedroom faces out onto the square, and at night Niamh likes to leave the window open. The fresh air is nice, but the surrounding area is quite noisy: dogs barking, distant helicopters, horses pounding stable doors, sirens, cars, shouting… so I ram two dirty old earplugs into my ears. The walls on either side of our house are shared with neighbours. On the right hand side, No. 1, there live between two and eight noisy Georgians and a parrot, and on the other side, No. 3, there lives a doctor, whom I hear taking showers at what seem like odd hours of the day. I know this because I can hear her electric shower erupt and roar each time. The people who live in house numbers 4 to 8 are a relatively unknown to me. I used to meet the family from No. 6 in the grounds of the church up the road, in the middle of the day, when I was throwing a ball to our dog, Gypsy, and sucking on a takeout coffee. To the rear of these church grounds there is a very high brick wall, on the other side of which there is Arbour Hill prison, mostly full of white-collar criminals and pederasts. The grounds of the church are very well kept. Two gardeners work there; one spends much of his day retelling his history of the place to whomever walks by, and the other is simple. The latter is very fond of Gypsy, and she of he. Along the wall to the side, which separates the prisoners from the church grounds, there is an enclosure of beautifully mown grass, in which you can find an old military graveyard. There are hundreds of large old headstones and tombs. Some are upright and self-supporting. Others lean back against the surrounding wall. Many have sunk into the soil. Often, a small, plump, balding man of about forty rolls up and parks his bicycle against the small upstand wall that runs to one side of the enclosure. He takes a tennis ball out from between the wheel spokes, then a tennis racket, which sticks like a tail out of the spring-loaded catch at the back of his bike, and he begins to play tennis up against the prison wall. It is the gentlest game of tennis in the world.