The following description has been passed on to me by a walker who spent Saturday on the North Coast.
The scene is beside the car park at the carrick-a-reed rope bridge.
“I was with a friend doing some sightseeing on the wettest day of the year, and having set out for a stroll to get a better view of the rope bridge (which was closed due to bad weather) we came upon three men in a piece of exposed ground under a large cliff face. So strange was the situation that I’m not sure if it was performance art or some patients on day release. One man was sitting on a fold-up stool. He was bald, quite old and wearing some manner of an upside down hat, which contained a shoe mould as well as a child’s shoe. Another large, oldish character was wearing a high viz jacket and lying on the ground staring at a boules/petanque ball. He occasionally…got up to throw it (badly, according to my friend, the boules expert) and follow after the ball, before getting back down on the ground and resuming his staring. Meanwhile, the third man who was younger than the rest produced a rusty bicycle wheel from a bag and began rolling it around the rough ground. Every so often he would squeeze an old-fashioned low pitched car horn, which sounded not unlike a duck quacker. This was taking place at approximately 2.30pm on Saturday afternoon. My questions: are there surrealists at large on the Causeway Coast? And if so, naturally, is this art? Or is a local institution missing some of its in-patients.?”
I am a lecturer in sustainable development and governance at the School of Law, Queens University Belfast. I also conduct work at United Nations negotiations on the environment for the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
My book on the attention economy and mindfulness as commons was published by Routlege in June 2017. See A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism: Reclaiming the Mindful Commons (Routledge Studies in Sustainability)
My research interests include consumerism, green politics and the economy. I locate myself firmly to the left of the political spectrum. I write in a personal capacity.
Born in Donegal, I was raised in Derry and now reside in Belfast with my family.
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