Situated along the river Liffey, I remember my father driving to Strawberry Beds with his young family and his German wife (my mother) and stepping into a small bare looking pub by the side of the road. There he ordered a pint, a gin and bitter lemon, and 7Up for me and her sister. Once settled around the small bar table in the otherwise deserted pub, my father unfolded his arms, took a sip from the pint in front of him, and went into his story-telling explaining very proudly that a "linguist" in the early part of the century came here from England to study the local accents and dialects. The linguist declared after extensive travel in the English speaking parts of the world, that The Strawberry Beds has the clearest spoken English in the whole world.

I remember being no more than five years old, recalling this was the first time I had heard the word "linguist" which sounded highly exotic. I recall looking around to see if the linguist would appear. I remmeber the sun shining through the net curtains and looking around the room seeing no one to verify her father's claims. I remember continuing to sip on the straw that kept disappearing into the 7Up bottle realizing it was the first time my sister and I had been allowed to have a fizzy drink from a bottle. I remembers sitting there expectantly waiting still for the linguist and others to appear speaking this illusive sounding English but no one appeared. I then remember, as we all got into the car and were driving away, looking for the strawberries and again there were none. Yet my father seemed delighted by the whole outting. She recalls feeling bewilderment that somehow she had missed something quite "extraordinary", a word my father kept repeating enthusiastically and smiling proudly when he referred to Strawberry Beds.

Decades later, I query with interest how we move in the consciousness of our own memories and the felt meanings of these experiences. The experience and subsequent association of Strawberry Beds was positive yet absurd at the same time and this, argues I would argue, is the felt-experience that lingered preserving the memory. Abstract art is, in some ways the perfect medium where this sense of contradiction in consciousness can finally have a place where the unconscious can be expressed and it make "sense".