Cloud Cover

Two more days of recording. Voices of children in the streets, moving hyperchoirs on both estates. An older woman on the Cupar side who has lived in the area for fifty years. A long talk with the gentleman who keeps the homing pigeons (see above). There are threads starting to emerge in the conversations. Both sides have a a growing awareness that the Troubles have now ceaseed to be a hot political issue and are now dominated by economics. There is a wariness about the political leadership, whether Paisley or McGuinesss or Adams or Robinson - a sentiment that the lives that have been most affected by the Troubles have long since been forgotten. Communities on either side now plagued with a whole new gamut of social problems, unemployment, drugs, suicide. Spoke to a woman named Theresa on Bombay Street who has had two sons and a brother take their lives in the last five years. Her sadness was tangible, draped on her like the clouds off the North Sea coast. To ask questions about the future seems almost inapropriate in the face of that kind of desperation, but there is a spirit in the Ulster Irish that knows survival, that knows what living through pain is, that sings still, barely audibe at times, paeans to the sun behind the clouds.

SOUNDINGS: the pigeon loft