The husband and I are staying in the Liberties in Dublin for a few days, at his ex-girlfriend's terrace house while she's away on holiday. Upstairs are three small bedrooms and downstairs are a sitting/dining room, a galley kitchen, and a family bathroom at the end. There's a wee garden, overgrown and leaf-strewn, shadows of birds flitting across the walls. The husband tells me the house is worth 300k. Historically the Liberties was a working-class area, home to whiskey distilleries and textile workshops. But this part of it is fast gentrifying, posh cars on the street and a long queue outside of the local shop/cafe selling pain au chocolat and fancy cheeses.

The ex is a journalist, who once wrote a column about attending our wedding for a national newspaper ("the one who got away" joked a friend). She came of age during the Celtic Tiger, sharp-eyed, gregarious, avid for gossip and adventure. Once in a while she'll come to our small town, young shy son in tow, and sit up drinking into the night, regaling us with stories like skinny-dipping with a government minister and his wife one night during a media conference.

Because her life is so busy and she's about to move, the house is in disarray. There are books and papers and children's bits everywhere. Sticky kitchen floor, bed linen hanging in the shaggy garden, and no coffee in the cabinet. Obviously she is no domestic goddess, or a consummate acquisitor and organiser of possessions, which would be antithetical to her way of being, so exterior, so out and about in the world, a magpie of personalities and events. I think of Marguerite Duras: "I've thrown things away, and regretted it. Sooner or later you always regret having thrown things away at the same time or other. But if you don't part with anything, if you try to hold back time, you can spend your whole life tidying life up and documenting it. Women often keep gas and electricity bills for twenty years, for no other reason than to record time and their own virtues. The time they once had, but of which nothing remains."

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I brought two books with me to Dublin. Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal. It is riven with long windy sentences, which I have to reread and sometimes I fall asleep mid-sentence, I've been so tired lately, busy all the time, the air pressure so heavy that relief comes in thunderstorms. Only last night, under the great vermillion ceiling of the Long Hall on George's Street, this made me think of my friend who had lost her daughter last year: "the three bodies commingled eyelids closed like on port monuments in the south of Ireland in memory of the people drowned."

The other book is Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, which I borrowed through the public inter-library loan service. A book so popular, it took me 6 months to receive it, and there are already 12 reserves on it. Well-thumbed and waterstained, with a pink cover disclosing the image of a cool-eyed young woman, seen as if through a druggy haze. "There was no reason I could give him for being in Bakersfield other than that I was a frivolous young woman prone to adventure--and his dignified posture was not about to get an explanation  like that from me. He'd been up since 5:00 AM." Possibly Babitz is a young woman's Kerouac.

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