I grew up in the west of Ireland in the wild countryside without running water or an indoor toilet, central heating, a telephone or a car, with public transport limited to one bus per week to the nearest big town which was thirteen miles away. The surprising thing is that I’m not ninety years old! I’m substantially younger. I moved to Dublin in the mid 1990s when I was still in my late teens. In my time here the place has changed immensely.

It is easy to slip on the rose-tinted glasses and start on about how the emphasis now is on working rather than living and that there was a better way of life back then, but at the time it didn’t seem that great. There may have been a better class of people on the dole - I was one of them, so there must have been and I do remember a lot of good times on the dole in Dublin in the 90s.

It was possible to survive on not very much money; easier then than it is now because there were more people in the same boat as you. But it was a grimmer place too. While there may be parts of Dublin that I wouldn’t like to get lost in now, there were places back then where you’d never be found again! My memory is that street crime was more evident. I know parts of the inner city where once there were drug dealers standing on street corners and, well, now there aren’t.

When I was in Dublin only about six months and still very innocent, I fell in with a group of lay-abouts in Dublin. Good-natured, lay-abouts. They were to me anyway and they gave me a few tips. One of them told me where to go to get the Big Issues to sell and I did this for a while to supplement my social welfare payments. I only had one embarrassing moment doing this when I bumped into a fella that had been in my class at school only about a year before. He bought a magazine from me and was very good about it, but the shame … the shame!

I got a couple of glimpses of the future Ireland while I was selling the Big Issues on the streets of Dublin. One of them was when I saw a guy walking past holding something up to the side of his head and talking into it. I can’t remember when I learned the name for this practice (talking on your mobile phone) but when I saw it first, I thought the fellow was obviously mad and I was just happy that he seemed harmless and didn’t seem to be any kind of threat to me. In any case the thing he was holding to his head was taking all of his attention.

The other glimpse of the future I got while selling the Big Issues was on a different street in Dublin. It was on a different day and I suppose I could only assume that the fellow talking to himself on the other occasion had been safely locked away for his own protection. Out from the crowd of people on this busy street the shape of a man emerged. As he got closer I kept looking. I had seen people like him before on television, but this was my first in-the-flesh sighting. He was black!

This first black man I saw in Dublin probably has a very interesting story behind him because apart from being black he was also very obviously homeless and would probably match anybodies mental image of a tramp. He is the one and only homeless, black man I have ever seen in Dublin and when I saw him again last year as I passed by on a bus (I haven’t climbed the ladder that far in the meantime), he looked like he was wearing the same coat that he was back then.

In the years since, I have seen a lot more mobile phones and a lot more black people. I think the changes have been good. When I left work at 6pm this evening and got my smoothie and having walked the short distance to the bus stop (listening to my mp3 on the way and having got on the bus and then having got stuck in traffic and watched the same traffic light blink green, orange and red about three or four times and then having got home at 7pm having traveled a distance I could and should have walked in 30 minutes, as I got off the bus), I thought - and this is quite serious that this is the best time of my life. Maybe that just means that my life up to now has been crap! Maybe it’s because the sun is shining or maybe it’s because I’m in love, but life seems good.