The Walking Voter

"Will you vote for me?" asks the candidate.

There are more candidates than could be elected in a millennium of polls; but they are all hopeful.
I semi-recognise this candidate, so I ask the name?

Which is a mistake; for I am then showered with many different pieces of colourful paper in many shapes, according to the printer's current megalomania. All extol the merits of the candidate, mostly in bad grammar.

His featured picture was taken a long time before this day, which is why I recognised him. I could recall the person in the picture, not the puffing would-be legislator moving along beside me, at a trot.

"Are you going far: to the shops, maybe," he asks in hope.

He slows when I explain I am out for a quick ten kilometre walk as part of my training for the Dublin City Marathon.

I entered for it back in the short days of late winter and here in the longer days of summer I am desperately trying to increase my speeds per kilometre.

Distance is coming along nicely as my body hardens up. Problem is: my mind wanders when I am out walking and I find myself slowing up to smell the daisies.

Which is how the candidate reminds me. I am slower than usual today.

I speed up.

We establish that at a particular time in the past our life paths had crossed. Now, here we were again, both of us running for something, together, yet apart.

Though my running is so slow that I am walking, his is for election, and he will soon come to a dreadful halt when not enough voters agree with him that he is the ONE.

I say I will vote for him, of course.

He falls away from me, in relief.

 

 

 

 

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Smoking Runner

I am walking along, determined to be a better person than I am when I meet a smoking runner coming towards me.

She has just completed a 5 kilometre course with others wearing the same pink shirts that proclaim they are all individually members of a group dedicated to some common cause.

Either the word women, or, ladies is printed among the other words on the shirts; but I am too polite to stare to see which, for I may be perceived as a predatory male walker.

I smile at the sky above their collective heads, instead.

There is a 10 kilometre course up ahead to complete for those who did not want to go home.

But since that is the same course run twice it hardly seems to count as a longer distance.

More of an instant action replay of the previous distance covered, I feel.

The smoker carries a plastic two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola from which she swigs in between puffs of the fag. I can't help noticing she is a little overweight for a runner, but resolve not to stare.

She is walking towards me and I step aside, breaking my own training pace.

She takes this as her right for she is a veteran now, having chased the others around five kilometres of tarmac, for a while.

They sweep past me with the determined step of the righteous achiever.

The solitary smoker is on the outskirts of the group; a weak member to be left behind by the fitter members of the pinkshirts, when her time comes.

She does not know this as they pass me by, unnoticed.

I stopped smoking twenty years ago; but am overwhelmed with desire when her trailing smoke reaches my nostrils.

Jezebel I think, unfairly, as I resume my own pace.



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Kissing Charles Aznavour

The woman is kissing Charles Aznavour on the wrong street in Dublin. She is much younger than he and he seems to be accepting her admiration with benign patience.

It is early morning and I wait politely for her to conclude.

She has asked me for directions to a conference venue.

She and a male companion, not Chuck the singer, are on a street parallel to where they should be and have declared themselves to be lost, to me.

I know where they should be and begin to say so when passion overtakes the woman who takes leave of Monsieur Aznavour now that I have become her guide.

The third person in the relationship tells me they are enroute to a very important conference where a great many important people will gather to hear more important people speak to them about a matter of great importance.

I lose interest when he tells me his own area of interest is in the nuclear field. He waits for a suitably admiring reaction from me; but I am heading home from a session with a physiotherapist for a damaged small finger on my left hand.

My finger hurts from a leap from a high wall and the consequent treatment and I could care less about nuclear.

To no response, I tell him the 18th century building we are standing beside was once a city hospital. I tell him where he is going, The Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, is modelled after Les Invalides in Paris, to no response.

By now, Charles is peeling the woman away from his presence.

She smiles shyly at me as if I am party to a great secret; but I now see it is not Charles Aznavour at all, but someone else.

I don't know who he is and wonder if he is French at all, or, just someone she mistook for another.

 I wonder who she thinks I am, as I take leave of them to catch my bus home. 

Nuclear.

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Talking Dogs

A woman with a dog stops me to talk to me about her dog and about mine.
I don't mind that she coos over my dog and asks me her name and then speaks to my dog in a familiar way without having been first introduced to my free-running companion.
She tells me what her dog's name is and waits. So does her dog, who is on a lead with a little bell on it to remind him at every step that a human owns him.

I don't feel I can enthuse about a dog I have just met on the way to the river. Me and my dog are going for a swim. Well, she is, and I am going to stand there and try not to get wet when she shakes herself dry.

I don't say this to my dog's new best friend.

She may want to come with me and learn our secret way across the grass to the best place to swim.

We get away and I make a note to travel a different route for a year or so to avoid such an encounter being repeated.

People with dogs can be odd creatures if you meet them unexpectedly on the road, on a sunny morning.

Best avoided.
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Summer Loving

Summer Loving

Brendan Nolan tells his original story of what happened when a smiling man called to the door of a lonely woman.
Have you ever contributed to a good cause?
But, what do you do if the good bits go bad?
Well here’s what happened when Maria opened the door to a stranger.