metrocentric | Been away for a bit. Not really here now.

The automated announcements on the Luas are delivered in an assertive tone. When she says: 'Please move down the tram', her delivery stops just short of an exclamation mark and despite being appropriately seated you wonder how best to obey her. She declares the stops in both Gaelic and English. The longer, varying titles have the value of a language lesson; the shorter names, sound identical in either tongue so repeated, like command and reprimand: 'Raghnallach. Ranelagh.' [back here boy and out the road you idiot hound] 'Doiminic. Dominick.' [put that down now you wicked child].

It had been a very long time since I last heard the term 'skin-popping' in conversation - not since the late 1980s. Then just the other week, over two days, twice: one afternoon in Stoneybatter, the next morning by the Wholefoods mimic at Smithfield. On the latter occasion more detail was available - with the air of a jaded phlebotomist a young man was explaining to his customer the eccentricities of her misused circulatory system, and alternative means of getting his product into her bloodstream.

Over five days I saw posters for one missing dog, two missing cats, four missing men.

In Tallacht, digitally rendered representations of intended uses are pasted to the windows of vacant ground floor units, in the customary manner. A scene of a cafe includes no customers, but a solitary member of staff, whose gaze reaches beyond the room with an expresion of troubled yearning. Another tableau, another cafe: there are two customers at opposite ends of the depicted room, one has her back to us, revealing nothing; the other is facing away from her table, hunched over and absorbed in her phone. These images are almost subversive in that they portray the interiors less as a typical developer's aspiration, more as the alienation and anomie we can expect to see in reality. They also owe a considerable debt to Edward Hopper.