Middlefocus

  It may have been the light from a sunny day at the beach because a glint of something caught my eye and made me pay attention. Glass. I stooped to look closer and picked up a bottle. Had it been just discarded or washed up? It looked as if it had been buried, brown caked-on sand around its neck, still stoppered. I could feel the embossment on the body and dusting it down could read the details: REGISTERED. WJ. BRIGGS. BELFAST and signed WJ.Briggs. But what did it contain? Holding it up to the light I peered inside hoping to find a roll of paper - a message in a bottle maybe. No such luck, it was quite empty. No hint of or even a trace of whatever liquid it once contained. One thing was sure, it was a glass bottle, dulled by abrasion but clearly vintage. This would-be beachcomber wanted to learn as much as possible about it. Questions surfaced. Why was the bottle here? How come? What was nearby? Who left it, an adult or a child? Does the Briggs company still exist? Where was it? S...

A railway line runs close to the rear of our home. Local and express trains including the hourly ones serving the Belfast/Dublin route hurtle past every fifteen minutes and apart from the occasional sustained warning blast of an air horn we don’t pay them much attention. Visitors to our home are taken aback: “Does that noise not bother you?” It doesn’t. It is simply part of the soundscape of where we live; something we are used to. Our paternal family has close connection with the railway. Granda Christy was a driver on a steam locomotive for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) which also operated in Northern Ireland. A story is told of him stopping his engine on the Antrim Coast as he felt that the sound coming back to him from up ahead was not quite right. His intuitive experience was correct, boulders had fallen unto the track. Catastrophe avoided. A close call. Christy TRACEY with his steam locomotive. Photo source unknown. Exterior sounds are one type of resonance and t...