Proxigee

Clare: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

I repeated, roughly, the hill and beach walks of the last few weekends, with the emphasis on flights of steps. I covered about 9 km alone (with about 200 m of vertical steps) and then another 3 km with my companion from yesterday. I started of in early sunrise haze and finished in mid-morning full sun, at about 15C; the first time I felt Spring had arrived

Insecure Vandals 

Which was interesting to me because I was watching a few people swim at White Rock and I wondered if they knew the sea was probably the coldest it ever gets, the water temperature in the Irish Sea lagging the air by about three months. The guy in the wet suit with the boogie board seemed unconcerned but another guy in ambitious Bahama shorts went blue after about four minutes, fled from the sea and stood shivering hard in his towel.

I also wondered if the swimmers realised they were swimming in an extreme Proxigean Spring  Tide, the tide rising about almost a meter higher than normal because of the coincidence of the full moon syzygy and a lunar perigee. I hardly saw the full moon last night, hidden as it was behind the clouds that delivered the rain to Landsowne Road that helped complete the rout of the English rugby team, providing our new stadium with its first great memory. The tidal thing won't concern and may even mystify those who live in Kansas, Kazakhstan or Kenadsa and think the sea is a waste of space. The tide was so high that I had to climb over the jutting rocks that separate Killiney and White Rock Beaches, where the granite is in direct contact with the country rock, now schists.

Contact

Today's dog walkers on the beach filed past, ever polite. A nod of recognition or even words of sympathy (rarely apology) when the snarling or barking dog harasses you, as two did today. Perhaps the Latin words like equinox, perigee or the vandalised beach buildings were suggestive but I kept thinking of the walkers as Romans (not quite troops), walking in their straight lines and armed with (tennis ball) slings or launchers that looked like short swords drawn and ready for action. The allusion fails when I note most had earbuds in place to avoid actually hearing natural sounds of breaking waves and birds.


So which opening line was from Pompeii by Robert Harris?