Like many students this month, I’ve just moved into a new flat from the country. My view is the epitome of urban. No matter how far I crane my head out the window, I can’t see a hill or a mountain, just a flat sprawl of grey and brown buildings.

I can just see the St Patrick’s cathedral spire over the rooftops. Like crystals being squeezed out of the bedrock, glass turrets of huge new apartment blocks are shedding their scaffolding, heralding an imminent influx of people into Dublin 8. Although there are already some bourgeois enclaves dotted around the area, they are tucked away behind electric gates, to keep the natives out, and are relatively modest in size and ambition. The new blocks are on a very different scale, and I am curious to see the effect that hundreds of (presumably wealthy) apartment-dwellers will have on an area that is predominantly family-based, split between traditional two-up, two-down houses with tiny gardens front and back, and mid-century monolithic corpo flats, no higher than four or five storeys, albeit newly painted and pointed.
But I don’t know the area yet, don’t know the shops, haven’t found my shortcuts or got the hang of the noises, which are no louder than the country (which is always a noisy place) but alien enough to wake me. A crying infant is the most insistent noise, across the road from me, and its raging cries for food stir something in me I didn’t know I had. An alertness, an anxiety. I am newly sensitised to everything, overstimulated, and haven’t yet learned how to eliminate the commonplace. Some things I don’t want to become numb to – the pungent smell of roasting hops from Guinness’s, the sight and sound of lads careering around on two-seater traps behind glossy well cared for horses.
People leave their doors open around here. Not many, but enough to be reassuring. Kids barrel around on their bikes, calling out to each other in raw Dublinese, an accent I love, colouring my neighbourhood vivid, and giving me an unmistakable sense of place.
Mornings are bewildering in a new environment. Like a blind person who has memorised where the furniture is, I normally move about from bed to fridge to kettle to cupboard to bedroom to toilet to bedroom to letterbox and back again without conscious deliberation. But in my new home, it’s like being repeatedly woken up out of sleepwalking; I find myself opening the wrong drawers and doors, walking into the wrong room, wondering where I am; standing frozen like a fool trying to figure out what I should be doing. Perhaps I’m just getting old. But I’m sure in time I’ll memorise enough to keep me asleep longer in the mornings. And the TV in the corner, digiboxed with 100 channels, a psychic black hole, is a constant invitation to get unconscious in the evenings. Mindfulness is exhausting in times of change, anaesthesia comforting. Necessary.
It’s a steep learning curve to get the hang of things, and this change is more dramatic than most. But I’ve moved flats many times, so I’m well used to it. I know this one won’t be the last; I’m not much of a settler. But hopefully I’ll be here for a few years.
It’s been decades since my student days. Where I am now is a far cry from where I lived when I was putting myself through drama school. Then, it was just one room. All my worldly goods were kept under my bed, and my records were stored in an old wooden cabinet, with the player on top. It was in the top floor of a house in Ballsbridge, with push-button lights in the hall that always went out before you got to the top of the stairs. Every room in it was subdivided with cheap glass-topped partitions. It was designed for students, to exhort as much money as possible from those who couldn’t afford anything better, run by a feckless socialite who did as little as she possibly could to maintain the house. In my room, the fireplace had a broken slab of marble over the grate, that I managed to paste together and put back up, although the smoke used to seep through when I lit a fire, which I needed to in the winter, as there was no other heating. I painted the bare floorboards a purple gloss, with a rug in the centre that used to rise up and hover alarmingly when the wind blew. The only time I ever felt an earthquake was in that flat; it woke me up in the early morning as the old brick pile swayed to a faint, deep tremor. I used to sit on the Georgian windowsill and stare down at the trees and smoke, endlessly. I wrote in silver ink on the glass the words “oh dear...”. (Well, we were New Romantics, then.) Years later, I met a woman in a pub who was describing her old flat, which sounded familiar. She said, “I always wondered who wrote ‘oh dear...’ on my window.”
There was a “kitchen” of sorts, a cubbyhole off the landing with a hot plate, a fridge and a sink, and three of us shared it. Although we had no choice over whom we lived with, the other tenants in the flat were a likeable lot, in the main. The caretaker downstairs turned out to be a kleptomaniac though, which was bizarrely crazy-making, as ordinary things like pots and pans would disappear overnight. We eventually broke into her room when she was away and retrieved our stuff; our rage at her was quelled by the stark evidence of her mental turmoil; her room was stacked full of boxes and drawers and bags, crammed with similar objects; one drawer would be full of batteries, another bursting with keys, another of balls of knitting wool. It was my first encounter with an unsettled mind; back then, none of us knew how to deal with the situation, and the landlady just wrung her hands and shrugged, and nothing was done.
It was hideously expensive, and yet it all seemed par for the course in being a student; the instability, the giddy excitement, the parties, the joints, the acidic wine, the promise (rarely fulfilled) of sex. Queues formed outside the door of gatecrashers to our New Year’s Eve party, ushering in the totemic year of 1984. Photographs of that time, in pretentious black and white, show me and my friends looking louche and bewildered, with all of us, male and female, wearing kohl under our eyes, staggering around in black frock coats holding bottles of wine. Bowie’s 'Let’s Dance' was always on the record player before we went out; but when I came home, it would be ‘Low’.
I’m sure student accommodation hasn’t changed much over the years. There will still be the fortnightly backbreaking schlep to the laundrette, coming back with everything boiled the same dull grey. Baked beans still come in the same small size tin. Bicycles will still get tangled up with each other in the hall, ESB bills will still be unpaid on the kitchen table, waiting for someone to do the sums. Fridges will still have post-it notes laying claim to lumps of mouldy cheese and rashers well past their sell-by date. Torn posters for gigs will still be blu-tacked to the wall, Rizla packs will still be stashed behind the cutlery, plates under the sink will still have green furry growths on them beside the tomato ketchup, saucers will still be ashtrays, mugs will always be chipped and greasy, baths will still have ring marks because no one will stick to the cleaning rota, bottles on the kitchen table will still have stubs of candles in them, and copies of hotpress will still be lying around under the dead spider plant by the loo.