This morning I jogged along the Liffey to the old port and back. There is something captivatingly atmospheric about abandoned docklands. The rails on which cranes once travelled, the silted-up basins, abandoned warehouses, railway lines leading nowhere, heaps of rubble, cobbled lanes leading to weed-infested wasteland… The old dockland has been redeveloped a lot but there are still a few of these areas left and somehow I could imagine how they used to be, bustling with sailors and stevedores, steam engines and wagons, cranes and slings, ships and tugboats. Now, especially at an early hour, there is nobody. Just ghosts and a few relics of bygone times…