The Day of The Cranes Is Nigh

So I sat there outside the very last building of Sir John Rogersons Quay. For a while the ships coming and going from the port had me hypnotised and dreaming of becoming a stow away. Then I thought again and realised the furthest I'd get is Holyhead and that's just not different enough to be bothering with. In fact it is a definite step down from where I sat.

That's when I turned the other way and stared straight up the Liffeys throat. It was low tide and I sucked in some of that good fermented Liffey sewage air. (Not as bad as it used to be, but still noticeable on the right days). I gazed at wonder at how the Spire looks like an arrow about to be fired from the Samuel Beckett Bridge and then I turned to the empty building. To say it is a building is a bit kind. It's a shell of a building. One of those NAMA assets. You know the ones. Some bloke borrowed loads of money to build a glass building only for him to go broke and it's now just left there without even the most basic of outer walls.

It was supposed to be some banks former future HQ if you will before they all got too greedy and lost all their money and ten times as much money that wasn't theirs to lose. But what makes this one extra special is the bank that gave the money to build the building, to rent back from the bloke at an inflated price to service his debts to them is the one that went bust. There is some kind of Karma at work there for definite.

It made me think of all those poor sods who bought into the idea of the Tiger and all that nonsense. All those folks who are now desperately trying to pay off the huge loans their not so dream homes cost. I mean they couldn't be their dream homes. Most poor feckers thought getting a home in a soul-less estate 90 minutes from their place of work was a dream. Those estates miles from the places they grew up, lack the most basic sense of community.

Anyway I'm being sidetracked here. I got to watching the cranes that dotted around the ghostly looking building. There are 4 of them. I stood up on top of a giant concrete block and gandered around. More and more unused cranes ghosted in and out of a growing mist. All the men that worked them are sitting at home on their arses (through no fault of their own) or waiting patiently in line for the dole. And it got me thinking of the Ghost Estates all around the country with these creepy metallic beasts loitering all around. What is to become of them? Are they just destined to rust away in the elements until the next boom. You can't even cover the fecking things up with boarding they are too big. Or will they all become sentient and organised and attack the people the put them there? (This is too much to hope for.)

I guess we'll just have to wait until one of them collapses and crushes some poor passer by before something is done about them. But mark my words, they are a very real menace.