The Naked Bunch

This is a documentary that I helped out on in late summer. Myself and Annikki Heinemann went hiking with a bunch of nudists in the Austrian Alps.

this is the documentary:

www.oddisee.tv

Berlin loves you – Berlin Loves You

Romance doesn’t thrive when the temperature gauge is showing minus thirty, and that’s often the case in Berlin winter. What we get instead is an adapted form of love that’s more honest, more subtle and in the end more raw than the love that flourishes in other places. It’s a mutation, a hybrid creature borne out of extreme seasons and a transient bunch of neighbours. It’s maybe not to everyone’s liking. The truth of the matter is that we’re all single in this town. We’re casual as a tracksuit. As committed as a holiday romance, and have about as much thought for the future as glue sniffers.

You’ll not find a more independent populus than the inhabitants of Berlin and sadly independence and love come together like oil and water.

But deep down. I mean once you’ve crawled beneath the lack of attention and the me, myself and I outlook of a typical Berlin relationship, you do find love, and you’ll also find someone who loves you. You just might not notice it straightaway.

And that’s because love in Berlin is lazy. At the weekend, the girls don’t put on their glad rags and the boys don’t take off their dirt rags. You can bat your eyelids and throw come-to-bed eyes like ninja stars across the floor, but it ain’t going to move even the most desperate of us if we’ve found a comfy chair to drop on.

Love is also brutally honest. If something better comes up, you’re entitled to flip all other plans out the window. If the person you thought you were about to have breakfast with gets wind of an after party, they’re completely in their rights to drop you at the U-bahn station and burn off into the night on a squeaky bicycle. You shouldn’t be offended. It happens to the best of people. You see no matter how hot, interesting and ‘going places’ you are, you’re never going to be able to compete with what Berlin might have to offer next.

But in spite of the laziness and the honesty, there is still a good dollop of love for everyone who wants it in Berlin. You just got to keep your chin high and your eyes peeled. It’s there. This city is a baby factory. We’ve all got jobs on the assembly line and the orders keep on coming, and it looks like it’ll be another weekend working our asses off to fill them. Thousands of babies, everyone wants one, and if we can remember anything from our schooling, it’s that the number one ingredient in a baby recipe is love. Berlin creates more babies per capita than anywhere else in Germany. Adding it up that means Berlin’s got more love to give than anywhere else.

And if you don’t believe that, fine. You can just go join the other cynics and find your love floating on top of a lukewarm späti cappuccino at 5am in the morning.

Berlin loves you – Berlin is Good for you

It’s not obvious. You cast a cold eye over the multitude of bars and cheap booze joints, then you throw a quick glance at the club listings that read like the red eye timetable in an airport, and you think to yourself, this town could never be good for my health. It’s like Pinocchio in the Land of Play and any day soon the donkey ears and tail will start sprouting from beneath my skin.

Everybody in here can tell you some tale about a 52-hour session that nearly stole their life. Or a drunk bicycle crash that almost robbed them of walking. And even a dodgy kebab that might have given them advanced Botulism. But in spite of the legends and the close calls, we’re all still breathing, cycling and eating Turkish. That’s because, contrary to how it seems, Berlin is actually good for you.

Lets start off with time. Berlin gives you another ten years just like that. In the bag. You never even asked for it, but you got it. In all other cities across the world people are buying homes, growing bellies and settling into a rhythm that begins with an alarm clock and closes with a bad reality TV show. But not in Berlin. The thirtysomethings act lie twentysomethings, and the fortysomethings act like thirtysomethings. My dad visited here a year ago. He described it as a town full of kids with a few token grown-ups to drive the trains. Dad, you were almost right. This place is full of grown-ups, they’re just another ten years off acting that way yet.

In Berlin you can eat really well. That’s not saying everyone does – these people invented cream quark after all. But you can eat really well here. And not only is the food good for you, it’s fashionable too. The Berlin food markets are clubbing for people who go to bed at a reasonable time. You find your bohemians haggling over a quarter kilo of bruised tomatoes and your arthouse yuppies quizzing the farmer over the size of his free range eggs, but they’ve all got one eye on the dancefloor. In another place it’s the watch on your arm or the car in your drive, in Berlin it’s the size of your beets and the length of their food miles that determine whether you’re going home alone tonight.

But more than this, the main reason Berlin is good for you, is because of something that’s been around longer than you and I put together: the trees. In New York you’re never more than five foot from a rat. In London, you can switch rat for free newspaper, and in Berlin you can substitute the word tree. They’re everywhere. I’m writing this surrounded by them. Big wooden bodyguards watching over us all, filtering our air and protecting us from UV rays and heavy downfalls. Next time, you’re strolling through Berlin and feeling younger, healthier and more energised than you’ve ever done before, you should pick out a trunk and give it a hug. Plant a kiss too and say thanks, for being a tree, for being there and for being good to you.

Berlin loves you – Berlin Makes it Easier for You

Friedrich III may have built this town but they got the punks in to decorate. From the graffiti that grows faster than ivy to the squat culture that rears an ugly head in even the chic quarters, punk influences Berlin like the ocean influences California.

When you’re at a free party under a bridge and the police still haven’t shown up – that’s punk for you. When you’ve gone three days without a shower and you could still walk into a job interview – that’s punk for you. And when you cycle a bike home at 3am with no lights and no brakes and you’re getting away with it that’s punk too.

Now you might be the type of person who changes carriages or even swaps footpaths when one of these heavily-pierced dinosaurs come into view, and that’s OK. But what’s not OK is forgetting the debt of service you owe them. Cross the street but doff your cap because the punks of Berlin have made it easier for you, and here’s why.

They did it by setting the bar low and rebelling against everything else. They walk their dogs without a leash. They drink and smoke wherever the hell they like and when they party, they turn the noise up loud and don’t consider the neighbours. What this means for you and me non-punks is that we can get away with more than we would in any other city.

It’s a lot like the big sister syndrome and I know because I have an older sister. When we were kids she used to sneak out and not come home for days. She was drinking and acting like most teenagers do and when my parents came down hard on her, it was worse than dousing flames with paraffin. It was all out war in a small windswept bungalow in the Irish midlands. So by the time I decided to hit puberty, my parents had had enough of being disciplinarians and let me do as I pleased. I could have brought go-go dancers back to my room and all they’d have said was ‘Do your friends need pyjamas?’.

My sister made life easier for me. And the punks make it easier for you. You might come from the generation who feel punk died the day Margaret Thatcher took office, or the other one who feel it took the plunge soon as Billie Joe Armstrong started singing, but next time you’re sat in a bar with some stranger’s dog at your heels, and you’re smoking a cigarette and you run a hand through your unwashed hair and think ‘chip fat’ and in that exact same heartbeat a pretty young thing sidles up to you and smiles, don’t thank your lucky stars, and don’t even thank fortune, thank Berlin and thank the punks for making things easier for you.

Berlin loves you – Berlin Listens to you

You can mind your business all you want in this town, but trust me, someone else will be minding it too.

Berlin’s a talker’s paradise. There are so many ears just lazing around waiting for you to unload. If you ever feel lonely here all you got to do is stop dead in your tracks and wait for a conversation to sneak up and bite.

I guess it’s got a lot to with what’s at stake. You see Berlin’s an experiment first and a city second. You take a giant handful of lefty radicals and mix in a healthy dose of college educated fortunates and their freshly-ground politics. Then you move them into the same streets as old communists and new immigrants and set to cook for twenty years. And what you pull out of the oven looks a little like Berlin today. It’s a sweet batch but it’s crunchy. Not everyone loves their neighbour but they will do everything in their power to not end up hating them. And this is why they talk so much in this town. And if you don’t mind putting in the time, eventually they’ll listen as well.

Berlin is a hotbed of characters and personalities but there just aren’t enough stages in this town to accommodate them all comfortably. So they take their shows onto the street and that means you’re participating. It might just be a bark from a drunk, or a shriek from some corner shop diva, but it all derives from that same citywide drama that’s just waiting for you to step front and centre and deliver your lines.

Take this picture for an example. This is a friend of mine called Bill. Bill is not from Berlin but he’s a typical Berliner. He takes things slow. He has a sweet tooth and he loves to chit-chat the day away. He’s interesting, witty, jovial and most importantly Bill has got time for you. You can find him in the parks or maybe along by the canal. He’ll listen to your life story and in exchange will tell you his.  It’s interesting and kinda magical. If you’re lucky he might have some biscuits on him. He’ll share but don’t be too greedy.

Bill sits amongst a gigantic cast of small talk champions who live in this city. Wisdom dispensers, available at all times of the day and night.

And that’s why you should always pack a box of biscuits when you’re on the roll. Carry them in your pocket or somewhere they won’t melt or crumble. And the next time you meet a Bill or a Benni or even a Steffi and a conversation develops that might take in lifetimes, dreams or just passing comments on the crippled pigeons, you’ll be prepared.

Berlin loves you – Berlin Values You

I got asked to write a column for the Berlin Festival. I wrote five short pieces and took pics to more or less express the way Berlin is like a warm and loving mother to all us washed-up, broke ass ex youngsters escaping the real world.

There aren’t many places on this fine earth that mother you quite like Berlin does. She takes you up in a pair of flabby arms and pulls you in close to her bosom till you nearly choke on the love. She’s a protective old soul who only wants the best for her kin. Other cities grow cranky and snappy like dogs on hot days, but not Berlin. Berlin loves you. She’ll stay awake till she hears the key in the door, and get up extra early to make sure your eggs and juice are just how you like them. Berlin loves you. Oh mamma, she really does. Here’s why.

BERLIN VALUES YOU.

You can get by on a small amount of money anywhere. If you set your standards low and if you’re prepared to allow any type of food-looking products down your throat, you can survive in the most expensive city for a long time and risk nothing but your likelihood of living till you’re old. In Berlin, even better than a small amount of money, you can live off nothing, and live well too. Because in Berlin, you see, everything is money, and that means you don’t need the actual notes and coins anymore. It’s a kind of a non-economy where value has nothing to do with price. And you are all very, very welcome to invest.

It starts at the bottle and works its way right up to the top. Empty bottles are the leading industry at the heart of the Berlin non-economy. Families are fed, housed and educated on the strength of the small deposits on returned bottles. And you can too. Throughout the city you’ll see novice entrepreneurs diving into the industry with little more than a brief education and a couple of spare plastic bags. One day they’ll run this town.

After the bottles, the next step in the non-economy is the junk trade. Berlin’s streets are not paved with gold, they’re paved with cobbles. But on top of those cobbles sit a whole bounty of cast-off junk. Clothes are good finds. If the look fails, and it might because they don’t get thrown out with no reason, you’ve always got a ‘found it beside a dog poo on such-and-such strasse’ excuse. But furnishings are also great finds. Three legged chairs and water-damaged tables are everywhere. They just need some glue and tape and a condition that only petite people use them. When the day arrives that you’ve more furnishings than space, you take the excess to the fleamarket and haggle hard until you’ve made enough to retire twice and marry someone twenty years your junior.

The greatest example of the Berlin non-economy is to be found in club land. Oh it’s big and it’s intimidating and the queues run so long your eyes give up. And there you are stood, trying to keep your place, but your bladder’s saying set me free, and you can’t read the system so you don’t even know if another half hour waiting will mean you even get in the door, when some bad dressed kid skips past and inside like he’s stepping through grandma’s door for a piece of pie. That kid is a runner from another club. He’s the lowest rung. A sympathetic dog’s body breaking 16hr shifts, taking the worst cut of the tips and hanging on by a thin thread, or Club Mate. But he’s not queuing anywhere, and he’s not paying for his drinks. Wealth gets you nothing here. Live close to the street and it comes wagging its way into your hands like a puppy dog.

In Berlin money has a value like everywhere else, and you will spend it here just like anywhere else. But when the trash on the corner can keep you afloat, you start to look on money less as numbers and more just as paper and cheap metal. That’s just Berlin’s way of saying that not only does it love you but it values you too.

The Old Man and the Sea

I spent a week in Berber Country in South Western Morocco in February. I was doing a surf story for Ryanair Magazine.  If every story I did was a surf story for Ryanair Magazine, I think I’d be the happiest little freelancer in the world.

Taghazout lies about a 25-minute drive north of Agadir. It’s built right on the shoreline. At high tide, you walk out the door and your feet get wet. And sometimes when storms batter the west coast of Morocco, you can’t even open that door. One storm back in the 1960s stayed for a week and left with the entire fishing fleet on its back. But in general the waves that creep towards the beach fall into the enticing rather than frightening bracket.

It’s home to a traditional Berber community but, because of its proximity to the sea and good surfing breaks, has always had a healthy mix of foreigners coming and going. It started with the British Navy who used to stop by and swap their rusty Winchesters and venereal diseases for provisions and trinkets. Then US Marines stormed through during World War II liberating the Moroccans from the Nazis. In the late 1960s, the children of the war vets blew into town bringing their own form of liberation called peace and love, and after them the first combi-vans full of surfers appeared.

Lahcen Aitidir (pictured, previous page) got his first surfboard from an Australian in 1971, but he’d been surfing before that. “We surfed on tree bark or pieces of palm trees,” he says. “But it wasn’t so nice. It cut your skin.” They were the original boogie boards.

Lahcen is 54. He’s a sinewy, short man and when you see him throwing himself off the rocks on a multi-coloured longboard you think he doesn’t stand a chance against the incoming waves. But then he ducks and weaves past the breakers and you remember he’s been in this water for half a century and is as comfortable on a wave as a mountain goat is on a mountain.

Lahcen lives with his wife in a beachfront house at Hash Point – which got its name for being the lazy man’s surf spot in Taghazout. It’s a right-hander that breaks just in front of the town. You can pretty much down your tea, pay your bill, make a slow run for the water and be dropping into a wave in a few minutes. It’s the place where the first hippies arrived in the 1960s, and Lahcen remembers the time well.

“They had no passports and they didn’t use money. They traded necklaces and jeans for fish or even hash. They stayed all day without clothes. People were used to it. It was a great time and they were very nice people,” he says.

The hippies stayed in Taghazout for nearly 10 years. They lived on the beach or with Berber families. Everyone in the town can produce old photos of them with some Joni Mitchell look-a-like. Hendrix visited during that time too. Rumours abound that his song Castles Made Of Sand was written about the vulnerable buildings along the beachfront, but since the track was written in 1967 and Hendrix did not actually visit Morocco until 1969, it remains unlikely. Lahcen doesn’t know if he met Hendrix or not. “I saw many people who looked like Jimi Hendrix then, and they all played music too. They were all Jimi Hendrix.”

In 1973 the Moroccan military arrived in Taghazout with 20 trucks. They brought the hippies to the airport and deported them. People in the town cried and protested. “Their families in America were probably looking for them, but we were crying because they were our friends, our family too.” The surfers who arrived in the 1970s didn’t replace the hippies, but they were met with the same affection. Lahcen remembers the first VW van. “It had a kangaroo on the side of it,” he says.

Even today, the surf spots in Taghazout aren’t rammed compared with those in Europe and the US. Twenty surfers out in the line-up constitutes a busy day here, while most breaks in California or even Cornwall could only dream of such intimacy. But back when Lahcen was first surfing, two other bodies in the water felt like a crowd. As the 1980s progressed, Taghazout became the only place in North African surfing.

James Bailey, 26, runs the Surf Berbere hostel and surf school. He’s Lahcen’s neighbour. A short holiday and a £200 (€228) deposit later, he was swapping city life in London for a place where sun and unpredictable bowel movements are both guaranteed. Like Goa and Costa Rica, Taghazout is home to that brave breed of traveller with the ingenuity to make their favourite destination their place of business.

Surfing is the only show in town these days, and any other tourism that exists is riding on the back of the industry. The surf schools offer lessons on what are probably some of the best breaks to learn on. The water’s warm, the waves are consistent, and thanks to the scarcity of booze (it’s still available, don’t worry), you’re not paddling out every morning trying to piece together the night before.

It’s a special, close-knit place. If you wander into the surf shops around the town and mention Lahcen’s name, they’ll tell you that the first board they ever surfed on was his. Surfboards were, and still are, luxury items. Improvisation, repair and scrounging are as much bywords of the Taghazout surfing community as low and high tide. It wasn’t a million years ago that people here were using telephone cable as leashes, and let’s not forget those palm-tree surfboards.

The generation that followed Lahcen grew up with an ownership over surfing. No longer just for blond Australians avoiding the winter back home, if one of their own could surf the same waves then why shouldn’t they? Moroccan youngsters would hit the water before school, then come back out again after the last bell rang. Like Brazilian kids dreaming of getting signed up on football contracts, the kids in Taghazout dreamt of surf sponsorships, and if that didn’t work they could open a surf shop or school. It was still a nicer life than their fathers’ or grandfathers’ who fished or farmed in the mountains.

Imane Zagraou, 30, is one of the first female Moroccan surfers. She runs a surf school and has a sponsorship deal with Rip Curl. Which in the Moroccan surf world is pretty much like having it all. But in order to get that far she’s had to put up with an annoying amount of negativity that comes from being a pioneer. “I got strange looks and people dropped in on me [my waves] on purpose,” she says. On top of that her business and registration papers took twice as long to process as they would normally do for a man. Taghazout may stand out for its liberal internationalism but it’s surrounded on one side by the sea and the other by a conservative Muslim population.

It’s this conservatism that starts funny rumours. One goes that during Ramadan the more devout surfers don’t go into the water for fear of swallowing and breaking their fast. Though that may be true for one or two, the people of Taghazout have grown up alongside hippies and travellers, and their laid-back attitude and curiosity is a product not only of their Berber roots but also a cosmopolitan mix of visitors.

So long as the swell is working Lahcen Aitidir still surfs during Ramadan. “You’re not a fish. You just close your mouth,” he says.

Letter from Sarajevo

I wrote this for the Irish Times a million years ago. The day it was published I was in Bermuda and I ran out and drank a bellyfull of Rum Swizzle, which cost immeasurably more than the fee I got for the piece. The glamour. Jesus.

LETTER FROM SARAJEVO

It’s the busiest Wednesday in a long time at Le Passage bar in downtown Sarajevo. Tiki, the ever-smiling proprietor, has decided to sell his beer at half price for the week, “It’s my little gift back to the people,” he says. The people while appreciative of his kindness are finding his offer to be a bit of a curate’s egg. “He’s making it very difficult for any of us to do any work these days,” says Darije a thirty-two year old Sarajevan and one of the new breed of entrepreneurs helping to steer Bosnia I Herzegovina back into economic contention with the rest of Europe. “Well anyway,” he says and signals for another round of Sarajevsko, “I’ll just have to work twice as hard next week and hope Tiki doesn’t plan any more drink promotions for a while.”

It’s already very hot in Sarajevo and the tourists have started arriving. From early morning, when the Mullahs’ chants ring out through the city, they are everywhere. Strolling through the small cobbled lanes of the Turkish Quarter, taking photos of the city markets and gardens or milling around the tourist office on Zelenih Beretki inquiring about the latest festivals and events and what Sarajevo has to offer besides city tours of the hot-spots from the war.

This is where Darije and his friends come in. For the past three years they’ve been mapping the countryside around Sarajevo and making trails for mountain bike tours. “The mountains around Sarajevo have some of the most beautiful and untouched areas in the whole of Europe,” says Darije, “During the war we were held siege by snipers and mortars for four years. You don’t know how good it is to wake up any day and be able to go where you want without restrictions.”

Darije might like to think he can go where he wants but the truth of the matter is that the city is still to a certain extent under siege. As close as half a kilometre from the city centre lie areas contaminated with unexploded ordnance devices and mines. Ten years after the Serbian army retreated and Sarajevo was liberated, the extent of the country’s contamination is still not fully known. BHMAC, the Bosnian authority responsible for the demining of the country, have recorded 18,000 mine fields in Bosnia I Herzegovina but suspect there to be another 30,000 unrecorded mine fields in the mountains, valleys and remote corners of the country.

The day before a farmer near Tuzla was killed when he detonated a “bouncing betty” mine. He was chopping wood at the time when the tree he was cutting landed in the mine’s path. The most frustrating thing for BHMAC is that this minefield was already known and marked with red tape. But the risk, according to the farmer, was small compared to the money he’d make at the lumberyard.

But landmine deaths have become rare in Bosnia I Herzegovina and back in Tiki’s bar in Sarajevo they are the last things on any one’s mind. The city’s busy. There are big crowds of teenagers, all decked out in their luminous summer gear, walking in front of the small terrace. One of them, a round kid in a yellow t-shirt that makes him look like a fat Tour De France winner passes us for the third time. “Do they just go round all night in circles?” I ask in my role as ignorant tourist. “It’s a Balkan thing you wouldn’t understand,” says Darije, “you northern types always have to go from A to B, we like to include C, D and even E.”

Like most young Sarajevans, Darije has dreams of leaving the country and working abroad, but unlike the majority he also sees a future for himself in Bosnia, “It’s like the poor man’s Switzerland man,” he says, “all we need to do is harness the potential of our wonderful countryside and more and more tourists will come”

One side effect of the heavy mining is that Bosnia’s countryside has been left largely untouched and undeveloped for over ten years. Wolves and bears have returned to the mountains and wild meadows and pastures have replaced areas that were traditionally used by farmers.

It’s getting on for midnight and Darije finally succumbs to the law of diminishing marginal returns and turns down my offer of, “one for the ditch” He gets to his feet slowly, “We’re mapping a fifteen kilometre trail between here and Mostar if you’re free tomorrow?” he says.

“Is that not a bit close to the old battle lines?” I say, “The whole area will be covered in mines” He rolls his eyes to say, for all the time you’ve been here you still haven’t learnt anything have you.

“A Croatian friend of mine is coming out with us,” he says. I look confused. “He laid the mines in the first place, so he’ll be able to show us where not to put our feet”

And then he walks away into the warm Sarajevan evening, stumbling, fumbling for cigarettes and finally disappearing from view, the new wave of legitimate Sarajevan businessmen and the future of Bosnia I Herzegovina.

Toilet Reading

This appeared in this month’s Totally Dublin. Freud suggested there were three types of fixation: oral, anal and genital. This story is mostly about the middle one.

A log’s tale / A Toilet Read

Totally Dublin’s first skatalogical guide to Dublin City and its rims.

In Germany, you don’t find books or magazines in the bathrooms. Neither do you find crude etchings of Roman bath times or witty warnings to wipe the seatie, sweetie. Germans go to the Kino, the Bierhalle and the nudist park to be entertained; when they go to the bathroom, they’re only interested in self-discovery.

You see German toilets are built with shelving units, unlike ours which are modelled on deep wells. When a German pushes one out they get to see the fruit of their womb, and all we get’s a plop and a splash as the pee, remarkably, tries to climb back from whence it came.

The Germans know their shit. And because of that you’ve got to say they’re some of the healthiest people in Europe. Not only are they 65 years without a genocide, but they emerged from the last recession debt free and with the keys for half a dozen Greek islands in their pockets.

In light of this revelation maybe Ireland could benefit from some anal gazing? Perhaps there are messages in the mud, smoke on the water, gold in the brown?

In order to verify this, we took a strange ride out to a rare and mostly unpeopled patch of Dublin called East Ringsend, to the capital’s sewage treatment works. If you’ve made it to the bathroom, then it’s made it here.

The complex is remarkable, but it wasn’t always like this.

Sanitation arrived late in Dublin. Remember the Viking Experience on Essex Street? It operated out of a church back in the glory days of Temple Bar, when it was full of squats and crack dens and served as ample fodder for parents who wanted to warn their kids of the consequences of not doing their ekker before Home & Away. The highlight of that tour was the smell. Early Dubliners shat where they ate and made no bones about it. And it wasn’t until the British arrived and taught us shame that we introduced sanitation to Ireland.

And then we put it on a pedestal. Not only is Ireland one of the only countries in Europe to not charge – directly – for water, it also has one of the most sophisticated sewage treatment networks in Christendom. In other capitals, waste travels along rickety Roman basins monitored by rats and pederasts; in Dublin, it’s like the Tube on a rare day when good services are operating on Central, Circle and District lines. Yes, we Irish have daily movements like any other nation but we manage to sweep it under the carpet with alarming speed and efficiency. Maybe an afternoon at the sewage plant would help explain why?

Like dating someone out of your league, the first thing you notice when approaching the plant, is that its shit doesn’t smell. The lack of stink nearly floors you. Last month there was a grand total of one odour complaint recorded. As recent as two years ago they could get as many as 30 in a month, but caps and seals have been rigorously employed to deal with gas leaks.

It’s larger than five football pitches with giant swimming pools that you know only too well are full of leftover Dublin, yet amazingly, even in the belly of the beast, there’s minimal reek. You establish that the air contains a heaviness and a warmness and a vaguely perceptible dampness, but it’s not unpleasant. And in fact, situated as it is, by the sea, you’d go so far as to say it feels positively Mediterranean. Ask the O’Connor family who live in trailers next door. They don’t mind, and they’re not going anywhere fast. The kids have fields full of stones to throw at the cars and Mrs. O’ Connor never runs out long stretches to erect washing lines. It’s a little corner of paradise. And if living beside a sewage plant is the price you pay for peace then so be it. Travellers in Ireland don’t live very long anyway.

Paddy and Ciaran run the show at the sewage plant. Both are engineers. Paddy’s from the old school and Ciaran’s the young buck on the prowl. They’re the classic Donnie Brasco twosome with a little less shine and polish. They’re engineers. Their names are bookended with acronymns. In modern Ireland, a job you wouldn’t even wish on an immigrant, requires a degree.

“Some people might call us shitheads,” says Ciaran, “But they wouldn’t try it to our face.”

Ciaran’s a Dub and he wears it on his sleeve like a gay who’s just moved up from the country. Paddy comes from Dublin, but he’s no Dub.

“It’s a very complex process,” he begins but I interrupt him immediately to ask when’s their heaviest period of the week.

“Well, you’d think Sunday morning after a night on the Guinness, wouldn’t you? But it all evens itself out.”

I had a sit down on Parliament Street this morning, by what time should it be worming its way to you?

“The city’s shaped like a basin,” he says, “It could be here already.”

It’s comforting to know that. A frantic reunion, like when you catch a glimpse of your luggage doing turns on the airport carousel while you’re walking into baggage claims.

Paddy chuckles in the background and offloads most of the answers to Ciaran. It’s a bond reinforced by the strangeness of their work. They’re a good team, and it’s going to be heart breaking at the end of this movie when Paddy shops Ciaran to the police. Maybe it doesn’t have to end up that way?

“It wouldn’t exactly be the first thing you tell a girl on a night out,” says Ciaran and jerks and dives dodging photo opps like they were blossom bullets.

Dublin got serious about sewage back in the 1880s and started to build the plant at Ringsend. Back then the boys would climb right into the pools and scrape the dookie into a tanker that brought raw sewage a few miles off shore then dumped it. And they wonder why, for an island nation, have the Irish such apathy towards swimming in open water. The men grew so immune to the smell that they’d even have their sandwiches on the edge of the pool. Marvelling at the sun flashing rays across the North Side, horsing into a Brennan’s (DANIEL: change accordingly dependant on advertiser’s darkest wishes) batch with their feet dangling in filth below. It was a decent job at a time when there weren’t many. On windy days, of which there were many, residents from as far north as Howth could sometimes catch a whiff of the plant in their back gardens. There are plant-facing windows along the bay that had signs glued to the inside saying ‘never ever open’.

Today, however the plant is almost odourless and clean as a whistle. Solids, the euphemism I probably should have used from the start to keep tender readers onside, reach a 6mm mesh where they are filtered into a settlement tank. Anything that isn’t at least 95% water rises to the top inside the settlement tank. A metallic jaw then scalps the solids and begins sterilizing thus reducing them to methane gas and biological fertilizer. This type of fertilizer is like steroids for crops. It’s so strong that the government allocate it in rations, but perhaps at heart they’re just afraid that if Irish vegetables are fertilized by Irish people, it might encourage widespread cannibalism.

The water which is left, is filtered through twenty-four sequencing reactors, which are stacked six stories high like a car park. Bacteria go to work and chew what’s left into liquid. Then a UV machine performs the coup de grace before your piddle is released into Dublin Bay. But don’t panic. It’s safe to go back into the water. The treated pee actually helps clean Dublin Bay. The colours on those blue flags don’t run.

After an afternoon at the plant, you re-enter the city with a certain spring in your step. The air’s fresher. You no longer feel like you’re using the shower after someone’s taken a dump. The city’s OK. Dublin’s not so bad. It’s had its share of embarrassments and a murky past that comes back to life when Ciaran talks about the unwanted babies they used to find at the plant. They were tiny enough to be flushable. The workers had a graveyard for them. Nowadays, condoms block the pipes. And that’s a great improvement.

We are a nation of shit generators. Be it the conventional sort that comes out our bottom holes, or the more theatrical brand that colours our speech. But if that shit can be turned into something that actually cleans our capital and makes it a better place for our grandchildren, and their children and their robot masters, then maybe the only thing we need to take from those over-achieving, continent-grabbing, Dirty Sanchez-loving Germans, is some more muesli.

Patsy Mcarthur: Escape from NYC

Patsy Mcarthur is a Scottish artist based in London. We met when she was in Berlin at a Big Lebowski night where everyone had to drink ‘Caucasians’ in time with the Dude. It’s harder than you think to put that much milk down your throat without your stomach turning to pure butter. After that night Patsy took off to New York to exhibit a series of paintings she’s been working on. It was the middle of all that Wallstreet imbroglio. Fanny Mai, Northern Rock and Bear Sterns were as household as Michael Jackson, and Patsy took a group of parkour kids, dressed them in suits then painted them jumping off  the peaks of  Manhattan skyscrapers. I wrote this for her exhibition at the Whitney.

Patsy Mcarthur’s work always tends to take a sideways glance at the human figure. She likes to take a regular character, drop them onto a canvas and see what shape they land in.

This time round they’re the white collar fraternity. And instead of granting the luckless suits the good grace to idle their days away at office desks and water coolers, Mcarthur has launched them forth on a tumultuous escapade across a downtown Manhattan skyline.

Mcarthur is Scottish, and like all people from small communities on the periphery of continents, she’s been forced to create a larger living space for herself. She spent a while in Barcelona, then Berlin and finally New York, the city Hollywood never tires of depicting as the only city that matters. But as the only city that matters it’s saddled with all those negative elements we associate with living the high-rise dream. It’s cold and lonely, and even the strong can find themselves upended by a hail of inexorable indifference. New York City is a poster boy for the rat race and Mcarthur’s suits are both the victims and the survivors of it.

In identikit office wear, they throw themselves off the building tops. They’re escaping from god knows what but you can be sure, to them, it’s well worth risking a life for. They race to the bottom, eschewing usual career path logic. Mcarthur doesn’t tell us whether they survive or not. For all we know some of them may be as adept at urban athletics as any other office worker and they’ll crash headlong into the ground.

But a few of them, at least, manage to plot a path to street level and start walking. They leave the city behind them. And we’re left to wonder, what exactly made them leave? And, more importantly, what kind of place will they inhabit now that they’ve turned their back on their secretaries, their ninety minute commutes and their lunch is for wimps. They bid farewell to the loneliness of the big city experiment and go in search of a community offering something better.

In black and grey and blue charcoal, Mcarthur’s figures are like the pioneers of a brave new world. They escape from metropolis without so much as popping a button on their shirts. They bid farewell to dystopia and cast a sharp eye west towards a real or just imagined utopia.

Funny thing is, walking together with the city at their backs and their escape playing out to a tee, you can’t help but notice that our heroes don’t seem any less lonely or any more engaged with their environment. Maybe they’re mourning for their friends who didn’t make it, or maybe regretting a poor decision, and perhaps, when you scrape your way down to the bottom of things, you find New York wasn’t to blame for anything at all, it was themselves.