Start from Dublin

The Quays, Dublin, Ireland.

The old question applies here: where's the best place to start? From where you are. That happens to be Dublin right now. As I'm thinking about this journey the November winds have taken up outside my window, breathing heavily and insinuating into the calm darkness of an early winter afternoon. Insinuating into my mind with all the impending threat of an Irish November wind, a kiss from the god of storms and fury as he waits off the Atlantic coast. If last winter was anything to go by, this one will be devastating and insistent, laying down strands of unease in the fibres of our winter coats. The snow will come and stay. The dampness, the thing I dislike above all others about this climate (second only to the flat grey light of these northern skies) will set into our bones like an epitaph and we will sink into our collective dream of global warming. I will leave when it is at it's height, this winter, will run eastwards from it as if being pursued by some ancient animal from northern myth. Hopefully I will escape it's clutches, stay just ahead of it's leaden breath.