As I walk to work, I listen to music. I recently got a 20gig portable player, so some days it’s psytrance, other days it’s leonard cohen, today it was freaky flow. The walk itself is long and straight. This means that I walk fast, and I mean FAST. Don’t weave around the sidewalk if you’re pottering along in front of me, I tell you. Sometimes I duck into the bicycle lane to pass crowds of small children or congested lumps of slow worker-types wearing impractical shoes.

With a 45-minute walk in both the morning and the evening, I have a lot of time with myself to think about things. I see people going by, caressing their take away cappucinos, and I think about how much I love coffee. I don’t let myself buy any coffee on my way into work. The reasons for this are twofold: 1. I would spill my coffee trying to walk so fast, and 2. If I started that early in the morning, there would be no hope for the rest of the day. It would just be one after the other at regular two-hour intervals until I found myself popping aspirin and twitching at my desk at 4pm with a double-espresso quivering in my hand. I guess there’s another reason as well, 3. I would go broke buying cappucinos all day.

It’s one of those things that gives me pleasure to think about though, so I often fantasize about walking to work with a coffee in my hand even though I never actually do it. I also watch the people going by wearing jeans and dreads and carrying translucent bags with coil bound student notebooks inside them. And I think, what would my life would be like if I were a student today instead of a worker? I could go into that cool café I pass by every morning to drink cappucino and read philosophy. I’d probably be broke, I think, and I continue walking to work.

Sometimes I think about moving here, living in the big city on a permanent basis. What would I do? I would go out all the time to gigs and clubs, I’d wear fancy funky clothes and get expensive haircuts and eat sushi that glides by my plate on a revolving platter. I would get a big butterfly tattooed on my upper arm (left arm, I think. Lots of twirly swirly bits in pink and purple and green) and wear my hair in a pixie cut. And I would buy a black kohl eyeliner, I think. And wear floating, diaphnous skirts. And I’d probably become very shallow and overly concerned with appearances, and would most likely have trouble sleeping from the amount of caffiene I would consume, and I might start shouldering people out of my way on the sidewalk, and I’d never get to hang out in west cork on the squishy seaside grass and breathe the ocean air deep into my lungs.

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