How do you travel to and from work? At the moment I travel by bus to Cork city for rehearsals of my new play, Bruen's Twist, from where I live in Clonakilty, Co. Cork.
How long does it take? One hour to get there and one and a quarter hours on the way back.
What time do you leave home? 9.25 a.m. to catch the 9.35 a.m. bus to Cork. Sometimes, I have mistakenly taken the 9.25 a.m. bus which takes a longer route and gets you into Cork 15 minutes after the later bus.
What time do you arrive back home? I get the bus at 6 p.m. and am home at about 7.30 p.m.
Do you travel the same route every day? Yes, at the moment. When I am covering GAA matches for RTÉ or the Irish Examiner, I have to travel to Dublin, Galway, Thurles or Sligo. The latter takes about 10 and a half hours by bus - I'd be in Los Angeles quicker and be less likely to suffer from deep vein thrombosis on such a journey.
What do you enjoy about your commute? I'm one of those people who can read on a bus so I find travelling by bus a pleasurable 'time out' of life when you can't be doing something else. Living in Clonakilty is a six- month experiment to see what it is like living closer to Cork city but I am moving back to Skibbereen soon and the journey by bus to 'Skib' is great. People ask me why I don't live in a city but if I lived in a city, I'd be spending my time-off going to the countryside. This way I can enjoy the countryside on a regular basis.
What bothers you most about your commute? I don't mind the journey per se but an appalling talk radio show on Cork 96 really gets my goat. There is nothing worse than having to listen to a half an hour of ignorance - you should castrate all rapists and send the blacks back to where they came from - to start your day off badly.
Would you change your mode of transport if you could? No. I'm a long time on the go and I've no interest in cars or learning to drive. I love long bus and train journeys.
How could your journey be improved? If a hole opened up and swallowed that talk radio show, I'd be glad \ if talk radio was replaced with hours of classical music.
In conversation with Sylvia Thompson
Traffic Gripes
Driving into town every morning down Upper Rathmines Road only to be brought to a standstill by cars and buses sitting in the yellow-box junction at the intersection of Rathgar Road and Upper Rathmines Road, I have to say that the worst offenders are the (normally courteous) bus-drivers. Traffic coming from Rathgar Road will blithely drive onto the yellow-box junction when the lights turn green, even though the traffic up ahead is bumper-
to-bumper. And, all this is happening about 20 metres from Rathmines Garda Station. Michael O'Gorman, Dublin
E-mail trafficgripes@irish-times.ie or write to Traffic Gripes, Features Dept, The Irish Times, 11-15 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2
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