Urban myth 5. Scalextric

The odd day you'd get it right. The wind would be at your back all the way from Ringsend to James's street. If you had a controller with robot-like spatial awareness they'd know more than your area, they'd know what door you were passing. A good day then would be the wind, the extra jobs along the way, surfing a bus to get to Trinity College. An exceptional day saw you racing another messenger across, along and through three lanes and laughing when you lost. Most days involved an altercation with a taxi-driver. Only a rare day saw you scratch their ride with the bike-lock key you wore on an elastic band around your wrist. Or better still, pulling the held-on-with-a-magnet radio-aerial off the back of their boot as they sped away.
You'd shimmy the pedestrian crossings on Dame street like a chess master, ache your way up to Christchurch and then have the beauty of a meander along Thomas Street passing the auld wans flogging industrial quantities of loo-roll and washing-powder to ghosts that lived in the Liberties.
Ah the beauty of it. And if it was a sublime, once in a season day, up at James's hospital the consultant's Secretary would be polite and actually look you in the eye.
A bagful of envelopes to keep you busy back into town and you'd smile all day. 

The bad days would be pushed further back into your hard drive allowing you to enjoy the moment. 

Funny; you saw everything and everyone at breakneck speed yet could remember the slightest details, dangers, daft moves and detours in ridiculous detail despite it being a split second in duration. 

It was mind blowing.

And the track lasted a couple of years. Survive the week, drink to your survival on Friday. Regain your strength over the weekend and rock up on Monday for another show; a combination of Mad Max, Gladiator, Ben Hur and Apocalypse Now. Then do it again and again and again. 

And as long as you didn't think about what you were doing too much, it became routine, almost banal, certainly normal.

It was just an awesome time.

For me, the green country boy, it could not have been more removed from where I'd come from. I'd always been getting away from something but now I was being given a wage for it. Everyone I worked with was doing it for the buzz. There were easier jobs that summer, better paying too. Yet the 'freedom', speed, risks and energy was unbeatable. We were ghosts in an endless summer of excitement; unseen yet glaringly obvious, invaluable yet outsiders, part of the electrical current running under the city.