I’ve been running for years – but on and off, always for fitness, never as a way of life. I can always quit – and do – but always come back to it.

I’ve run nearly everywhere I’ve lived: during the few weeks I spent in Edinburgh, as a postgraduate student in Norwich, a few times in America, in Paris, and now, once again, back in Dublin.

They say you never know a place unless you actually live there, but it’s also possible to live somewhere and not know it in the way that you do when you run it. Inclines that seem slight when you drive, cycle or walk are revealed to you when you’re dragging your legs up them, having already run several kilometres of hills.

This was especially clear to me in Paris: for months on end I had a fairly standard circuit that looped around from the rue Trousseau, up avenue Ledru-Rollin to place Léon Blum, then down the boulevard Voltaire. I thought of several things as I ran along that stretch: the fact that a young Picasso stayed in the hotel just before the turn to the gymnase Japy, a gym hall where the Parti Socialiste was formed in 1899 and where Parisian Jews were interned during the Second World War. As I passed the Charonne metro station I thought of the eight protestors who died there on 8^th February 1962. These three locations were within a hundred metres of one another: all cities are palimpsests of historical memories, Paris more so.

In Edinburgh I ran, thinking of Thomas de Quincey dying in that city in a dusty room, in debt. The muscle-stretching hills of that city lend themselves to transcendental thoughts when running, as does the mountainous east of Paris: when I’m climbing a hill, I’ll think of anything to distract myself from the difficulty of my task. Sometimes I’ll fix on a phrase and repeat it to myself internally until the rhythm becomes a mantra, like Bloom picking apart advertising slogans. Often I’ll just count to a hundred repeatedly, matching the rhythm of my pace. But most frequently I’ll look around, taking in buildings and streets and hills and reminding myself what I know about them, and promising myself I’ll find out more.

On the last night before I left Paris to move back to Dublin, I went for a run up the Canal St Martin, past the site of the Gibet de Montfaucon – once an elaborate and horrific cubic construction from which men were hanged. I thought about how blood would run down the hill from the gibbet, and then wondered if I had confused it with the Mur des Fédéres, the wall in Pérè Lachaise cemetery at which the Communards were shot.

I ran past the space-age Communist headquarters, up the hill and cut to the right, up some steps and around a curving cobbled street which a Situationist dérive had once reached. I later learned that this hill, the butte Bergeyre, once had a stadium sited on top – the stade Bergeyre, which in 1920 hosted the French Cup final, in which CA Paris beat Le Havre 2-1. It also hosted some of the football games in the 1924 Olympics. The stadium had been knocked down in 1926; one day it was there, then it was gone.

When I ran down that cobbled street on the butte Bergeyre, I didn’t know about the old sports stadium that was long demolished – I was there because it had become a place I was drawn to because the Situationists had been drawn there long before me.

Cities exist whether we want them to or not, whether we’re there or not. Yet Paris is still with me, even when I’m running along the pavements and through the parks of a south Dublin suburb. We come and go.

You may think my obsession with writers’ heat sources a little peculiar, but to me it’s quite a practical preoccupation. For the last five months or so, I’ve been writing a non-fiction book about Dublin. Much of this time has been spent in a box room in the rented house I share with my girlfriend on a south Dublin housing estate. The room is smallish, but big enough to accommodate two desks (a large desk – mine; a smaller one – hers). As my girlfriend mostly works from an office in the city centre, I’m habitually the sole resident here, sitting in my cheap office chair, trying to hammer out a substantial word count on a daily basis. A lot of this writing has taken place during a quite icy winter.

On cold days, I had initially tried working without any heat source at all – but my hands would freeze up, mangling the words I typed on the keyboard. I had a choice: either find some heating or fall considerably behind with my writing. Because it seemed wasteful, not to mention costly, to heat the entire house, I thought I’d try and find a small plug-in heater.

When you’re interested in literature, you begin to wonder how certain writers would do certain things: you become obsessed with writers’ working methods and try to emulate their approaches in the hope that a little of what you irrationally assume is the magic of their compositional process will somehow elevate your own tawdry routines. Don DeLillo composes each new paragraph on a new page. Nabokov wrote on index cards. Hemingway wrote standing up. Perhaps I could do these things too? (Many of these examples are drawn from Brian Dillon’s excellent I Am Sitting in A Room, a wry commentary on the obsession with writers’ rooms.)

While in this frame of mind, I wondered what kind of heater a great contemporary novelist – like Philip Roth, say – would buy if he was in my position. And by ‘my position’, I mean: attempting to buy a reasonably priced plug-in heater that would keep a twelve foot-by-twelve foot room warm.

But I’m sad to say that the literature on this topic is sorely lacking. I combed the Paris Review – usually the go-to source for information about the minutiae of writers’ habits – and discovered nothing.

Eventually, though, I found the dearth of literary commentary on the question of office heating somehow liberating. With no anxiety of influence to overcome, I unselfconsciously chose a decent heater and have been writing fairly steadily ever since.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood in the Poddle river, below central Dublin, and walked through the tunnels between Leo Burdock’s chip shop and St Patrick’s Cathedral, as research for my book about the city. Previous blog posts about the Poddle are here and here.

When Franc Myles wanted to trace the course of a river through Dublin’s Liberties, he had to go underground. He and a fellow archaeologist, Steve McGlade, had been excavating a site at the north-west corner of the junction of Ardee Street and Cork Street, below which the stream ran. “We said ‘fuck it’, you know? ‘We’re archaeologists, we can’t just let it run under the building and not investigate it’, so we did.” They climbed into the culvert that channelled the stream below Ardee Street and walked east, in the direction of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

It’s very difficult to refer to the Poddle as a single river. It feeds a knotty network of diversions below Dublin’s Liberties, and has gone by many different names over the years.

The Poddle has also been known as the Pottle, the Puddle, the Salach and, further upstream near Tallaght, the Tymon. The Commons Water, being a wholly separate river until it joins the Poddle at the end of the Coombe, is an innocent bystander in all of this. Yet its course, which crosses the artificial diversions of the Poddle, ensures it is often mistaken for the better-known river. When walking along the courses of the rivers, I frequently had to remind myself which one I was standing above, and which one I was about to intersect.

As well as telling me about his underground adventures, Franc showed me how to read the urban fabric of the city, so that you could look at a street, compare its form to a historical map, and tell what had once stood there.

Franc pointing out a street

Franc is an engaging guide to the Liberties area, and cuts a memorable figure:

Franc is six foot five in height and forty-seven years old, with greying hair gelled straight up in spikes. He was wearing a bright yellow high-visibility vest with the word ‘Archaeologist’ printed on it in black letters and a pair of streamlined Ray-Ban sunglasses; he wore both the vest and sunglasses throughout our walk, and pushed a bike alongside him.

At one point, Franc stopped to point out a wall:

See the wall in behind? That is a fucking amazing wall. It’s one of the few we’ve actually found a reference for – off the top of my head it’s either 1682 or 1692. We found a reference to its construction in one of the Brabazon leases. And it was basically constructed to separate land known as the Artillery Field – which was one of these places that during the disturbances in the 1640s they used as an artillery park – and the brewery of William Cheney. Now William Cheney, it turns out, is an ancestor of the former American Vice-President, Dick Cheney. So we wrote to him and said, “Any chance of getting a few quid for a publication?” We didn’t receive a response.

The Cheney wall, photographed through a building

Read more in the Autumn issue of the Dublin Review.

Taking my cue from famous football manager Alan Latchley (played by Peter Cook on a famous edition of the chat show Clive Anderson Talks Back), I’ve motivated myself to contribute to the new, Euro 2012-only, football blog Straight off the Beach.

My posts have included: Ireland, nostalgia and ice cream; the woeful neglect of Darron Gibson; Punditry and political stasis in Ireland; and the lost art of defensive midfielding (which is really just an excuse to talk about Thomas Gravesen).

Flann MacGowan writes more about Alan Latchley – and how international football is a bit like Mad Men – in this excellent post.

I’ve gone along to a number of Red Star 93 home games this season. Here’s my season review for French Football Weekly:

What I was watching from the freezing terraces of Saint-Ouen that day in February was a team that had adjusted to promotion and seemed about to ride the season out comfortably.

Then, Martigues equalised – an unmarked header, crossed from the left.

There was a sharp intake of breath from the crowd, then vehement and sustained cursing. Then silence. The man in a duffel coat who had been playing a single note on a recorder for nearly an hour and a half, stopped.

More on Red Star here.

Last week Joe Kennedy and I launched a call for proposals for our new digital venture, The Mammoth:

We welcome your proposals for blog-length pieces (600-1000 words) and longer non-fiction essays (2000 words and over). In particular we like well-researched narrative journalism, but will nevertheless consider any non-fiction on its own merits.

You can find the full call for submissions here.

I’ve also written a blogpost for Irish Publishing News about The Mammoth:

Instead of the internet reducing your attention span, we think it provides an opportunity to publish lengthier, more in-depth work – in short, what we are saying is: go long. [...]

There are a couple of ways of looking at it – one would be to call what we’re seeking ‘long-form journalism’. And there’s a certain truth in that description: a lot of the work in narrative non-fiction may not be immediately visible on the page – the intensity of the research process can be comparable to the legwork of the reporter or the academic researcher. However, I suppose where it differs from both those processes is that what one produces must be compelling in a way similar to a short story or novel. But there’s no single formula, and we’re very interested to see what proposals are sent to us. If you send a brief query email suggesting a topic you want to focus on, we’ll write back with a response and – if we like the idea – ask for a longer proposal.

More from The Mammoth soon.

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‘A brilliant little ramble through time and place’ – Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade

I’ve combined two essays I’ve written into one ebook: ‘Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght’ (shortlisted for the Some Blind Alleys essay grant 2012) and ‘The house that wasn’t there: Dave Allen’s ghost stories’.

The ebook is available to download for free from this site.

Both essays deal with an area of landscape around the Killinarden and Kiltipper areas of Tallaght. The first is an autobiographical ramble around Tallaght, attempting to trace the visible and invisible boundaries of the locality. The second discusses the comedian Dave Allen and the influence of storyteller Malachi Horan on his work.

If you have any feedback about the quality of the ebook files (especially the mobi file), please get back to me – I’m keen to hear responses, as this is my first attempt at putting together a digital book.

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TO DOWNLOAD:

Available in two formats (click format to download):

epub (compatible with most non-Kindle ereaders)

mobi (compatible with Kindle ereaders)

My essay, ‘Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght’, has been shortlisted for the Some Blind Alleys essay grant. An online readers’ vote has just opened. You can vote here.

There are seven judges and one public vote. The public vote is weighted as one judge’s vote. The judges are Kevin Barry, Carlo Gébler, Claire Kilroy, Molly McCloskey, Belinda McKeon, Philip O Ceallaigh, Keith Ridgway.

My journey took me along what I believed to be, more or less, the borders of Tallaght. These I hastily sketched on a sheet of A4 just before I left the house. They included trajectories along what were, broadly speaking, straight lines following the boundaries of Kiltipper Road to the south and Tymon Lane – the ancient roadway that runs parallel to the M50 between Greenhills Road and the elaborate motorway interchange at Balrothery – to the east. But the other boundaries were less defined, more permeable and unstable, and, ultimately, my route reflected that. I wandered along the roads that crisscross the Jobstown area, wondering how you can define the edge of the city in an urban sprawl that seems so haphazard. The problem is that you often can’t, and you have to rely on maps to tell where the boundaries once lay.

Read the essay on the Some Blind Alleys website here.

Download it in PDF here.

30 years ago today, novelist Georges Perec died in Paris.

He was also a crossword compiler, an indexer in a medical laboratory, a writer of extremely long palindromes and a member of the literary group Oulipo.

I’ve written a number of articles about Perec: here, here, here and here.

If you do one thing today in memory of Perec, question your teaspoons.

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.