Falling

Back from the blogging dead. Has The Cat Flap been filled with cement? someone asked. Pretty much, for the last few months, but it will now be re-activated. To begin with, a piece published in the Dublin Review for Winter 2010-11. The piece led to a documentary on RTE Radio, produced by Bernadette Comerford, available for download here

Poems, prose and who knows what else to follow...

When I started falling, I didn’t think much of it. I took it as something the body naturally did, a way of testing itself, maybe, or a kind of trick. I’d get up in the morning and go down to the bathroom on the first landing, splash water on my face, and immediately lose consciousness. A few seconds later I’d find myself on the red lino of the bathroom, haul myself up, and go back to the sink. And then it would happen again, and again I’d pick myself up from the floor and return to the sink. (I might not have been so quick to return if I’d known that water was one of the triggers of the falling, or rather the alchemy that took place between water and light as I washed my face.) To me, falling was just part of the morning ritual. Occasionally I reported it to my mother, but the notion must have seemed too silly to register, just the kind of thing a boy could be relied on to make up. So I went on falling, giving myself a few bruises every morning, lurching backwards into the day.

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