“What can I wish for you but happier days to make up for the crisis you came through with such resilience?” Derek Mahon* (1941 – 2020)
We are dragging ourselves over the line of what has been a truly remarkable year, mostly for all the wrong reasons. 2020 has been an absolute head melter. It feels apt then to have Niall Staines capture this sense of going through the wringer with our cover commission. His glitch style drags normality beyond recognition but still anchors it. Time has blurred and rumpled, we’ve all felt glitched but there’s still hope and the ones we love.
When asked about the prospect of a return to normality which we very much hope 2021 will bequeath us, the veteran writer Don DeLillo observed, “We may feel enormous relief, but for many people, it’s going to be difficult to return to what we might term as ordinary. I don’t know how that’s going to feel. I hope that it’s mainly a sense of rediscovered freedoms. You want to go to a movie. You want to go to a museum and eat in a restaurant. Those ordinary things are going to seem extraordinary.”
We toast the sense of extraordinary this Christmas for we have lived, loved and lost in this landmark year. A heartfelt thanks to our contributors, stockists, advertisers and readers for sticking with us as we try and navigate towards better days.
Nollaig Shona Duit,
Michael McDermott, editor.
*from the poem ‘A Birthday’ published in Against the Clock (2018)
cover image: Niall Staines for Totally Dublin, photographed by Maxi McDonnell.
