In Dublin, I smelled the last of summer's roses, white and pink-frilled, the edges corrupted by time. I watched as trees swayed, leaves falling, from a balcony overlooking Phoenix Park, as the distant figures of joggers and dogs with their walkers and rutting deer flitted beyond. It's autumn, at last, and it suits Dublin.

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Is Dublin actually two cities, overlaid like the cities in China Mieville's The City and The City, never to quite meet, unless one squinted? There's the city of the new, utilitarian and shiny and anticipatory. And then there's the city of the old: decrepit, weed-wild, nostalgic for former Georgian glory. They do not quite touch, even though they occupy the same place. Walking between these two cities, you see spirits from past and future times, and it's only until the train trip home, into the darkening West of farm fields and pastures, that I shake off that betweenness.




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