Dublin
The River Liffey winds its beautiful way through Dublin. I can stand on a bridge and see all the lights at night, I can stand and forget life for a moment. A place far away, where there is no-one around you who can criticise or comment, where there is no crowd to play to, no-one to impress, no efforts to be made. Every day spent away is revealing, an education. Every day spent back here after it is a frustration. A superfluous frustration to quite truly kill my time.
Spending time with all the different people who were with me on the trip, the notion in me grew stronger that no-one can be right when lives conflict and people's differences spill over.
Everyone with me had a different mind, different ideas; they got on with people that others didn't. Some, I got on with; some, I didn't. This is so obvious to me that for people then to stick to their ideas as if they have some God-inspired reason for believing themselves to be empirically correct, beyond reproof, seems simply absurd.
What I learnt most was to enjoy living the mundane, enjoy experiencing the everyday event. I felt better and more satisfied than I can remember of late simply sitting in the sun in the gardens of Dublin Castle with TJ, and talking about nothing in particular. Enjoying talking about JG's eccentricities, and how he must look like a tramp in that photo we just took, considering the new hat and coat he was wearing, etc.
I vow now to try to sit back and be blasé without worrying about the future. To find magic in day-to-day people and places.
But I know that I can't really do that while here, because I've seen everything there is to see and said everything there is to say. So I have to last out until I can go quietly, but I don't know what that achieves.
JG
We decided JG's mind is outside the realms of cause and effect and the space/time continuum; we find it hard to relate his actions to any kind of thought pattern, and any attempt to do so may result in damage to your own mind.
I happen to think he is a very clever man, but I have difficulty understanding him. After our concern at Kildare Cathedral, he happened to say something which set my unstable mind atilt again. I spent the bus journey back to Dublin crying, but it was because of me, not him.
"Have you rung home to tell your mum you got here?"
"No, I told her I probably wouldn't since I didn't bring a phone."
"You're all — well — not all she's got — but you're very important to her. As time goes on you'll gradually take over the role of your father, which is nice, really... A very supportive mother."
Just a few words, but they had a profound effect. This was someone looking in on our relationship and assessing it. This is a man whom I respect much, though he annoys some people. I always listen to everyone carefully, and this was just a little close to the bone. It put things in a new perspective in some ways. I already knew it, but it brought it home to me that all the trouble of the last year has been through love, and its irony. I don't really understand why I was so upset. But now I also realise that as much as a clever man such as JG can give me insight into some things, there are things he doesn't know and cannot understand — he wasn't here last year and didn't live it, and didn't survive the dark nights of banging doors and tears. I have to trust my own mind and judgment on everything in my life, because I am the only one living it.
TJ
The last day of our trip had the potential for incredible tedium. We were scheduled to finish singing Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (Dublin) in around quarter past twelve, and our flight from Dublin Airport was not until quarter past eight. With eight hours to kill, I had predicted that we would all have been rocking in the corner of a toilet cubicle by four o'clock.
But TJ saved the day. He, my friend and I spent the eight hours together just talking, watching the world go by and having a chuckle. And the time flew by. In fact, it turned out to be a day I will fondly remember. TJ had had a bad start to the day; he has suffered strokes in the past and has to take it easy. He had ended up sitting out the Eucharist in the morning, as he was feeling exhausted. We got him back on his feet with some lunch and then his warmth and wit came through as strong as ever. He enjoys the company of younger people, and I can see why; a man with as much intelligence and humility as him could never lump the pretentious self-assurance of his contemporaries. I was left with a feeling of warmth from that day, I had felt comfortable for the first time in many years. I hope I meet more people like him.
Francis Bacon
Following his death in 1992, John Edwards, a close friend of Bacon, inherited his Kensington flat. Upstairs in 7 Reece Mews was his studio, the centre of his life and career. A hive of inspiration and colour, Bacon spent the last thirty years of his life working in the studio.
In 1998 Edwards donated the studio and its contents to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. In 2000, after work by a team of archaeologists, who assigned every piece of paper, every paintbrush and every spatter of paint an X-Y-Z co-ordinate, the studio was entirely dismantled and moved to its current location in the Hugh Lane. Perry Ogden was allowed access to the studio shortly before it was moved, to take photographs of it exactly as Bacon left it before his last, fatal trip to Madrid in 1992.
Ever since I first saw one of Ogden's photographs published in The Sunday Telegraph a couple of years ago, I have been fascinated by Bacon's studio. It contains so much visual stimulus and is the product of an artist's mind at work, the by-product of thinking.
So intrigued was I by the studio that I used it as a basis for a stage set design last year for Black Comedy, a play by Peter Shaffer.
I enjoyed, therefore, seeing the real thing. You cannot go into the studio itself, for there is, of course, nowhere to stand and the studio would instantly be ruined; you can view the studio through one of five look-in points, the largest of which is naturally the doorway. No significant holes could be drilled in the walls, for the walls, too, were moved from the original location because they were covered in Bacon's paint and pigment. It felt a privilege to be able to stand in the doorway through which Bacon had passed so many thousands of time to work on a canvas.
The gallery also features the unfinished work that was left in the studio after Bacon's death, a video room running Melvyn Bragg's celebrated interview with the artist, a computer-driven micro gallery and a rotating set of extracts from the material found in the studio.