A New House

 

I moved house recently, this will be my last. Not suggesting that I’m moving on any time soon, but the house itself has strong echoes of the transitory. Its name, Bedeque, refers to a red-bricked street off Belfast’s Crumlin Road which disappeared in the seventies; the stone was taken from Enniskillen’s old railway station.

There was a time, when travelling on holidays, we’d be looking out for the first glimpse of the ocean; daily now, it’s our first view of the outside world as we look out over Rossnowlagh, across Donegal Bay towards St John’s Point, Killybegs and Sliabh League. The view through the dormer window has something of those old seafaring novels, I almost expect to see a galleon moored in the bay, but, actually it’s empty, the trawlers coming and going from Killybegs are hidden by St John’s long finger.

What I do see is the play of sunlight on the water, ever-changing as the cloudscapes are ever-changing in this part of the world. Glittering circles, burnished bronze; brilliant white streaks; silver-grey stripes; colours, that defy nomenclature, existing for seconds only, then passing with a puff of wind.

Some days the mountains are one with the sea, some days with the sky, sometimes all are one, lost in low stratus cloud, as empty a nowhere as anyone has ever seen. But the greatest glories come with the setting sun, spectacular at the end of August; red like the ambient glow on the cinema screens of my childhood, suggesting, as the old films did, mysterious, exotic worlds just beyond those wild impenetrable mountains.

And then, in darkness, the lighthouse and beacon lights across the bay; the house lights, street lights; the transience of our lives so much more appreciable in the miniaturisation of distance, beside the vastness of the ocean, its permanence and its indifference; there is a beautiful melancholia attached to it all. Which brings me back to the transitory: Bedeque Street in Belfast, Enniskillen Railway station; maybe I’m getting carried away?

It’s all relative of course, glad I’m not a mayfly.