HOME IS WHEREVER IM WITH YOU

ACHILL E'S HEEL

This is one of my favourite pictures in the book, it's a caravan park.

My childhood buddy and very talented photographer Linda Brownlee has just published her first book, pictures taken on the windswept, hostile shores of Achill Island, Ireland. Depicting a landscape hacked out by the weather that comes in from accross the atlantic like a herd of dark and stormy raging bulls and the teenage dwellers awkward in their youth, their love and complete with that great teenage vice; suspiciousness that i love so much.

I spent some time here surfing, climbing mountains and drinking a lot (alcohol not sea water). It's freezing, the water is freezing, the wind is freezing but everyone still gets drunk rips all their clothes off and sprints into the ocean for some skinny dipping. There are no lights so it's really dark and the shooting stars were all over the sky, i mean there were hundreds i could'nt make wishes fast enough. I counted over twenty of them blasting off in all directions over my head. I always recall this memory as someone standing on the shore and all the lovely moonlit wet goosebumped skin and the dark sky and the fireworks display of shooting stars over everyone's heads and us all looking up and right and left counting as many as we could, it seems very romantic from the shore, like a painting. the reality i'm sure was more like impending hypothermia and frostbitten essential digit loss.

So it's a magical place, Achill, it's the ends of the earth like in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, drinkable light and the sea filled with white lillies and all that.

Linda's book is beautiful and captures the essence of everything that is there but you can't quite put your finger on. You can buy Linda's book here http://www.lindabrownlee.com/index.php/book