Walking to work on a January morning

Leaving my front door, terrace houses built in the 60s line the narrow streets on both sides. From several chimneys soft plumes of smoke rise high, dispersing into the grey dawn sky. The footpaths here are uneven, a patchwork of different shades of tarmac and untidy pot-fills. The roads are even worse as the cold of winter reduces them to something akin to a crumbling shortbread biscuit but black. A middle-aged man on a mountain bike whizzes past me and shouts a friendly “good mornin'!” his voice carried away on two wheels. Still I’m obliged to shout “all right our fla” back to him. 

It’s cold this morning and my breath is visible in front of me as I exhale after every couple of steps. Then, on a garden wall, something catches my eye. The words ‘Up The IRA’ are eloquently scribed across it. In my mind I keep repeating it. 

“Up the IRA”

“Up the IRA”

 

And again

“Up the IRA”

It doesn’t sound quite right. 

So, I say it again. “Up the IRA”.

As I keep repeating it, it begins to embody a middle-class D4 accent:

“Oh yes, loike I’om completely up the IRA Fintan”

I feel like I want to meet this guerrilla artist responsible for the offence caused to the vernacular which has now arrested my brain with critical thought and class analysis. I need to tell them that you can’t write ‘Up The IRA’, as I now start to imagine some big, red faced, ham-fisted Yank, in all his Paddywhackery shout it like so. 

The unwritten rules of acceptable working-class vernacular mean you can only ever simply write ‘IRA’ or ‘Up the Ra’ - but never 'Up The IRA' - a point or error which seems to have eluded the creator of this now spoiled piece.

As I leave this conundrum behind, continuing onwards on my walk to work, I zig-zag shite on the footpath like a child playing hopscotch. But today it’s not the shite on the path nor the incorrect grammatically-correct 'Up The IRA' that gives me cause for concern. It’s neither the cold bite from the crisp morning air as it strokes my face with a gentle breeze nor the blister on my foot - the result of a poor choice of shoes. And I can live with looking at the littering of long languished carry-outs and the smashed microwave that occupy the loanan that leads to Doyle's. 

At this very moment the sky could start pelting me in the face with relentless hail and I wouldn’t care much, but for every couple of feet I'm met with another discarded disposable electric vape. They exist in every present colour which completes light’s visible spectrum and are scattered in various shapes and states. Some look like they’ve been disemboweled, their entrails - a small battery and a few crude wires – protruding from their crushed casings after their contents have been sucked dry by some vampirous feen for nicotine and now I ask myself, “is this where I’m destined to live?" A graveyard of spent e-vapes.