What’s the bars, hey?

That’s how you’d say “what’s up” in Derry. I walked along the Foyle this morning with Julie and her dogs. We saw Camp Jack under the Foyle bridge, a caravan that is hq for search teams looking for Jack Glenn, a handsome young man who walked into the River Foyle a few weeks ago. Hundreds of people have been doing regular shifts to try to find his body.
As usual, Julie and I nattered up a storm while Chips and Beau ran in and out of the Foyle. I drove her to a yoga studio where she was giving classes all day, then I went to a cafe for breakfast. On the way back to my car--parked on a dead-end street around the corner from a fitness gym--I came upon a group of men, two of them bloody, the rest clean. Apparently a fight had just ended.
My next appointment was with old school friends Cathy and Jennifer. I asked them about what I had just witnessed. They say Derry has a problem with extreme fitness and with steroid abuse. The gym near where the fight happened has been closed before because of drug dealing. It is possible that people were betting on the fight between the two men.
I had heard before that Derry has a suicide problem among young men and understood it to be tied to untreated mental illness. Today I learned that several of the young men who have jumped off the Foyle Bridge were body builders. So the side affects of steroids appear to be playing a role (possibly use of harder drugs). Also, the IRA has a vigilante justice approach to drug dealers. It is possible bridge jumpers are taking their lives to protect their families from the IRA, who have never been particularly selective in their retribution.
Good grief. The U.S. also is in the grips of opioid addiction from what I understand. It’s as if the casualties of our grand experiment in neoliberalism are accumulating in the mud of the River Foyle, the emergency rooms of the U.S., and on the sidewalks of any major city.

Enough grimness. I spent the afternoon visiting Edgar Bigger, widower of Susan Bigger, who was a very good friend to me when I was an awkward teenager. He told me lots of stories about Foyle College, where he taught, and about his childhood in Moville. He remembered being pressed into rowing boats out to the submarines parked off the coast during World War II, helping Moville residents sell whiskey and cigarettes to the crews.

Dinner with Julie and her husband Ian at Saffron, a restaurant owned by our fellow high school student Suki Nagra. Today was one of these all-day social events so I went to bed exhausted.
3-4