Blue Fire

It was the middle of November in 2014; a bone-dry but bitterly cold winter's night where I could see my breath billowing out two steps ahead of me. I was standing on Parnell Street in the middle of Dublin City centre, trying and failing to take shelter under the monument to the man who had given the street its name. Charles Stewart Parnell had been the leader of the Irish independence movement during the 19th century and the so-called “uncrowned king of Ireland” of his day. Despite losing his throne in a sex scandal, which had split the country like nothing in Irish history until Roy Keane had been sent home from the World Cup, the people of Dublin had still seen fit to immortalize him by erecting a large bronze statue in his image, a mess of old-timey beard and waistcoat that leered sightlessly down over a perpetually busy traffic intersection.

Behind Parnell stood a far taller stone obelisk topped off by a Statue of Liberty-style carved flaming torch. With no disrespect meant to the artist, I remember thinking on a freezing night like that I would have preferred if the cold metal flame could have been swapped out for a real one, as I rubbed my hands together and stamped my feet to try and keep warm. In truth though, I knew I had no right to complain as I looked south down O'Connell Street and saw the figures of the city's homeless huddled into doorways. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to know that you had no chance of getting out of that cold and didn't like any of the conclusions I came up with.

With a mixture of horror and fascination, I stood watching one of the homeless disemboweling a cardboard box to turn it into his bedclothes when my host arrived. Being engrossed in the struggle that was going on across the street from me, I failed to notice Keren skipping around the corner until she was already on top of me. “Thanks for coming all this way to see me,” she said making it sound as if I'd skied down one of the Alps rather than having taken the bus up from Galway. “I won't be able to stay long, unfortunately, I have to be back at 10 for curfew.” “It must be strange” I commented as we strolled in the direction of the pub which she had indicated would be a good place for us to carry out our interview, “to be an adult but still having to be in at a certain time.” “This is it,” she said, nodding very slightly in affirmation, “but you get used to it. Overall I know that I'm blessed. I'm very grateful.” For the past year or so Keren Jackson had been living in a homeless shelter while simultaneously running a social enterprise project, the evocatively named BlueFire, both of which I'd been enthusiastic about learning more about from the moment her existence had been made known to me by a mutual friend.

The pub that Keren showed me into was the rather unimaginatively named “The Parnell”, a large American-style sports bar that had rows of big-screen TVs on the inside and flags from around the world standing to attention on the outside. Despite the pub's relative solitude, our entrance was still noticed by a member of staff who stood behind the huge illuminated bar that occupied most of the ground floor. He made sure, as politely as possible, that we didn't take up any space on the premises without buying something first. I bought a pot of tea for Keren and managed to mask my disappointment when she suggested we share. I poured myself a cup of the revolting watery glop for the sake of politeness as we settled ourselves down at a comfortable table on the upper floor.

Keren sat down across from me and carefully unwrapped her scarf giving a quick ruffle to her hair to check it was all in place as she did so. She was very short with green eyes and cheeks rosy from the cold that were the only spots of colour in a pale face. She was only in her early 20s but carried herself with a confidence that made her seem older. “Well, thank you for agreeing to meet me,” I said, as I set up my voice recorder. “From the first time I was told about what you're doing I really wanted to speak to you about what it was like to be homeless. In this city, homelessness is all around us but I think the majority of people couldn't imagine what it would be like to experience it day to day.” “Oh people are completely oblivious to it,” Keren said with a conspiratorial nod as she took a dainty sip from her own cup of tea; to my mystification, apparently enjoying it. “I grew up in a very middle-class household and I know the first time I set foot in the shelter I was absolutely terrified; I wondered if I needed to bring some kind of concealed weapon in to protect myself! That was my prejudice, but I found out quickly it wasn't like that at all. People are often just blind to anything outside of their own perspective.”

 

Within only a few minutes of talking to Keren it became very clear that her worldview revolved very strongly around a belief in the power of individuals to take responsibility for making the most of their own lives. Equally, she extended that right to people finding ways to work around institutions when they weren't serving them. Despite coming from a house that was “as middle class as they come” she herself had dropped out of school at 15 and didn't show the least amount of remorse over it. “I hated school,” she said flatly.“I wasn't learning anything. I wasn't being challenged. I must admit that as a child I was quite flighty, I would come up with lots of ideas but not follow them through, but I was always ambitious and always wanted to be in charge of my own destiny. School never taught me anything in a way that I could relate to. During my time in secondary school, I got very depressed. I started going in less and less. During first year I was in 70% of the time. In second year I was in 50% of the time and during third year only 30%. After that, I stopped going in altogether..” She took another sip of her tea as if to wash the bad taste out of her mouth.

Shortly after dropping out, Keren had been lured back into formal education when her parents had managed to obtain a place for her in Youth Reach, a government program for early school leavers (or “like Fas” - Ireland's national training program for the unemployed – “for under 21s,” as she summarised it for me.) Although an improvement on school, even this new venture still hadn't been hands-on enough for her. “I did a nighttime course in event management while I was still in Youth Reach during the day,” she told me. “It was held in a local college, very basic, it taught me absolutely nothing” she continued, unworried as ever about appearing diplomatic, “but it gave me a piece of paper and some confidence. I was very lucky to find a job where I lived. In my town in County Kildare there was an old man pub” (for anyone reading this who is not from Ireland and not familiar with the expression, an “old man pub” is exactly what it sounds like) where the owner wanted to shake up his business, expand it, but he didn't know how to go about it.
He was looking for someone to help with promotion and I happened to walk in at the perfect time with my nice high heeled boots on looking about five years older than I really was, acting all confident even though I didn't have a clue about what I was getting myself in for.” Keren grinned mischievously before carrying on “I was only 17 when I got that job. I wasn't legally old enough to drink in the place where I was part of the staff.” She chuckled, as if still surprised that she'd gotten away with it.”Looking back on it, I suppose most people would think it was a great job,” she said reflectively. “I worked from home, I kept my own hours, I was on good money for my age. But at the time, it wasn't a positive experience when I was living through it day to day. The owner had no confidence in me. I kept coming up with these plans to reinvent the place that I'd present to him and he'd give them the go-ahead. Then two weeks later he'd call me and have changed his mind.” Seemingly without realizing she was doing it, Keren's face twisted into a scowl at the memory. Despite her claim that she'd been less than impressed by the pub, clearly, her work had meant enough to her that the annoyance at the wasted potential still rankled even years later.

The pub job had come to an end after about a year when the owner had finely decided that he was going to give up on his half-formed dream of modernizing the venue. Keren had signed on the dole for the first time in her life, her income being cut down to the standard 100 euros per week that all young people receive for being unemployed. “It's funny” she mused, “I remember back when I lost my job, I was so annoyed that I couldn't afford to get my gel nails done anymore. It's crazy to think that I was worried about that when I don't even wear make-up anymore. That was really before I had any knowledge of the real world and what real poverty actually was.” After a few months of trying to think of what her next step should be, Keren, still aged only 18, decided that taking some time out didn't seem like a bad idea. Taking the money she'd saved from working in the bar, she set off on what was supposed to be a holiday but ended up being the most formative experience of her young life so far. “I moved to Barcelona for the summer in 2012. I had no better plan so I just decided I'd get out of the cold for as long as I could. I planned to get a job but I never did because I couldn't speak the language” Keren told me, “so that meant I had to find the cheapest accommodation that I could possibly find. I moved into a squat with some African migrants I'd made friends with and.....” Her words trailed off. I couldn't tell for sure under the bad lighting but she seemed to be bushing slightly “I started going out with one of them.”

“That's where I learned about poverty” she continued, as the first Christmas song I'd heard that year began belching
it's farting synthesizers and tinkling bells out through the speaker over our heads. “I'd just come from a very rich country where everybody I knew was always complaining that they didn't have enough money, but what I saw in Barcelona changed my perception and showed me how misguided we are in this country. I lived among this community of people who couldn't afford to eat. People were doing illegal things as well, selling drugs, selling things like handbags illegally on the street. I came from a background where what was right and what was wrong were very black and white. I got to a point where........” she paused for a long time before continuing, with a statement that was still a great deal more unambiguous than I was expecting “......I almost agreed with my housemates doing those things in order to survive. Now, I don't think that's an OK thing for anybody in Ireland to do that because I don't believe anyone in this country is that desperate. But for them, it came down to either doing this or not eating. To give you an example of how bad it was, one night near the beginning I knocked on my neighbor's door and went into his bedroom just for a chat, and caught him dipping gone off bread rolls into milk. I remember staring at him and just saying “dude, is that you're dinner?” He had just moved in two days earlier and he was like “oh yeah, money's a bit tight at the moment.” I'll never forget that moment, when I opened the door and just said to myself, I have to have gotten this wrong, I can't be seeing this. That's what normal life is supposed to be like.” As she was finishing her sentence the first strains of Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You started up in the background and somehow made the bleakness of her story seem infinitely worse. “I felt terrible about it; here I was, this little middle-class kid who still had her mammy on the other end of the phone to send her extra money if anything went wrong. It really changed my perception of how the world really is and made me determined to do something about it.”

 

The very real sense of injustice these experiences had fostered in her clearly still stung. “Tell me more about how that led into BlueFire” I said, contemplating whether or not I should finish the unappealing cup of tea in front of me. “BlueFire started about......” Keren rummaged in her head to arrange the timeline as I drained the milk jug in the hope of tricking my brain into forgetting the liquid in my cup was still more than 50% tea “....about a year after that. I'd wanted to stay in Barcelona but I'd had to come home after the summer when I ran out of money. There were no jobs going anywhere, so I signed straight back on to the dole and immediately started on a FAS course. It wasn't really where my focus was though, to be honest, I'd spend as little of the money as possible every week just so I could fly back to Spain whenever I could to see my boyfriend.” But then that relationship ended, and......” her voice trailed off. “You know how these things go,” she said, composing herself. “He was my first boyfriend, my first love, I felt like my world was falling apart, you know? So I came home to Ireland again, really without knowing what to do. I found a guest house in Mayo where I could volunteer a few hours per week in exchange for food and board. I have to admit; that was hard. So hard that I was struggling to get through the work, even when I was just sweeping the floor and making beds. That absorbed me for a while.”

Judging from her story, the three years prior to Keren's sabbatical seemed to have been a mad whirlwind of constant new experiences. I wasn't surprised that it was only when she was in the solitude of the west coast that she'd finally had the headspace to conceive the brainchild that had eventually grown into the organization she was now in charge of. “Part of the reason I created it was that while I was still in Mayo I finally started to feel like myself again. I started to itch for something to do, something that would help me to move forward. And while I was there I had a memory of when I was sitting on the plane flying back from Barcelona for the last time. I remember thinking “I'm really sad that I'm going to lose all my international friends.” But when I thought about that for a bit, it started to seem less sad to me and more strange. I had heard that 17% of people in Ireland were born abroad and I asked myself if that's the case then why isn't that reflected in my group of friends. What's going on there? When I got back I tried to get involved in a multicultural group and I found it really hard. Where could I find friends from different cultures? In Spain I had friends from South America, I had friends from Africa, and I just really enjoyed being part of a multicultural group of people, getting to share different perspectives on things. As well as that, there was the issue of knowing what social segregation can do to one's soul. I saw that first hand in Spain. In fact” she added after a further moment's thought had made her realize that her connection to the issue was more personal than she'd first recollected, “I'd experienced it myself.
When I would walk on the street with my boyfriend, I would get stared at by everybody. As we walked, people would just be looking at us; their eyes would literally go from his face to my face, back to his face to our hands, and back again. They didn't bother trying to hide it. You could see them thinking “what's going on here?” She had gotten through the anecdote with far more composure than I would have managed; just listening to her story made my skin crawl with discomfort. Part of me wondered if she was talking about a western European city in the 21st century or if I'd missed part of the story and her personal timeline had slipped back to 1900. “It's soul-destroying. It takes away your capacity to engage with the society and the people around you. When I was in Spain I saw litter on the streets everywhere; I'm the kind of person who always picks up litter and puts it in the bin. But there I didn't do that because I'd lost all respect for the country. My Spanish is really bad so if anyone said anything to me that I didn't understand I automatically assumed they were attacking me. I became very defensive, very aggressive, very negative. I became an awful person to be around. And that same thing happened to almost every person I was living with there. You go out into the world and you're just..........” she grappled for a word to express the enormity of the emotions she was holding back. A few seconds later she settled on the perfect one. “You just become ugly.”

 

The spark that had lit BlueFire had started as an emotion, before becoming an idea and finally morphed into actions. Keren began the project by drawing on her event management experience, organizing low-key social meetups around Dublin such as drumming circles, dance workshops, or quiz nights. All of the activities being promoted had a multicultural flavor and were designed to appeal to people from a variety of different backgrounds. Her M.O. was very simple but clever; rather than lecturing people and risking putting them off by coming across as preachy, her organization tried to educate people by stealth, drawing them out to events whose principal purpose was to entertain. “People are often more willing to learn something when they don't know they're learning,” Keren said. “That's why we always make sure our events never forget to be entertaining, to bring in as wide a cross-section of people as possible. BlueFire is always focused on creating spaces in mainstream Irish culture where people can come together. All it takes is one person asking somebody else for a fag in the smoking area and starting up a conversation to start breaking down barriers. There is racism in Ireland but I think most of it, not all of it but most of it, comes from ignorance. And ignorance isn't the most terrible quality, it's just a lack of understanding and it's something that's very easy to remedy.”
 

The step from BlueFire's events being mostly confined to the backrooms of pubs to moving out onto the streets of the city came organically when Keren took advantage of a chance encounter with a friend of a friend who ran a festival known as Ten Days In Dublin. The festival, already coming to an end at the time we sat down for the interview, was actually more of a banner under which individuals or groups could put on one-off events around the city, benefiting from some free publicity by being marketed as part of something bigger. “I started chatting to this guy” Keren recalled. “I asked him what migrant groups were involved. He said well actually last year we had 200 groups and they were all Irish. I was like “Jesus man, there's 17% foreign-born in this country, how does that work? So on the spot, I offered to put on an event, either an African night or an intercultural night. I hadn't a clue what to do but started networking and promoting the idea to whomever I met. I started to get a positive response and it made me realize there was something in this.” Realizing that the event was quickly becoming too big for a single person to handle by themselves, Keren expanded BlueFire by advertising for interns to help her. Even though the positions were, of course, unpaid she was flooded with applicants, with many people already being able to see the potential in the project. What little money she did have was spent on rent for the office space that she quickly found she needed as what had originally been little more than an idea with a cool name turned into an actual organization almost overnight. “I went to a place called
The Chocolate Factory, an arts centre, which is just over there actually” Keren said breezily with a slight wave of her hand. She gesticulated to the window indicating that The Chocolate Factory was only a short walk away from where we were sitting. “I fell in love with the building. I offered the landlord 50 euros a week to put me in a corner, with a desk, where me and the interns could work. It just kept going and going from there without me really having to push it. I made a connection at the Department of Foreign Affairs and that got me some funding. I realized I didn't know what I was doing when it came to putting on large-scale events so I figured I'd just swallow my pride and go out and find someone who would teach me the skills that I needed. I asked a band that I was friends with and they put me in touch with a guy called Griffo who was the stage manager at a festival they'd played at. I gave him a call and explained what I was trying to do and just said “Look man, I've no idea what I'm doing but I have a lot of passion for it. And he was in.”

 

This all eventually led up to the founding of the BlueFire Street Fest, which had been held annually in Smithfield Square, on the edge of the city centre, in each of the two Septembers prior to our meeting. For one Autumn's day each year, the square had been filled with a jumble of humanity from the four corners of the globe taking part in what was billed as a multicultural music and arts festival. Events on the day included live music and street performing, public speaking, arts and crafts workshops, as well as face painting and even live graffiti jams, or, as its founder nonchalantly referred to it as “a bit of everything.” It seemed funny to me that even though Keren was happy to talk about BlueFire's accomplishments, she didn't do so with anything like the same obvious passion that she did when she talked about the philosophy that had inspired it. It was estimated that about 13,000 people had attended the first two BlueFire festivals; needless to say organizing something like when you're barely out of your teens is not something to be taken lightly, but Keren seemed to take it in her stride. It was as if for her there had never been any alternative for her but to go out and drive her own life down a path of her choosing.

When we had taken our seats about an hour earlier there had been four of five other people in the upstairs area with us, hunched over corner tables seemingly trying to hide from the world for a while. By this point in the conversation, all that was left, apart from ourselves, was one other solitary man who had been entertaining himself for the past hour or so by quietly singing along to the pub's in-house hit parade, cradling his pint glass as if it were a microphone at a karaoke night. As I glanced over in his direction he was gathering up his coat and beginning to shuffle towards the stairs. His relaxed manner gave him the appearance of someone who had a comfortable home waiting for him whenever he decided to head back there. His shambling ritual reminded me of the main reason I'd come to talk to Keren in the first place, casting my memory back to the slumped figures in O'Connell Street's doorways. Our mutual friend's departure had not gone unnoticed by Keren either. She looked around at the now-empty pub, finally becoming aware of how late it had gotten “I'm sorry, I didn't realize the time.” she said shifting uncomfortably in her chair. “I'll have to wrap this up in a few minutes or I'll miss curfew at the shelter.” Keren's homelessness had come about as the result of a series of messy miscommunications. After about a year of paying the rent on her office space, commuting in and out of the city every day, and trying to manage to still have some spending money on her shoestring budget had gotten to be too much, Keren had finally been able to find an agreeable social welfare officer who promised to allow her to combine the running of Blue Fire with an existing community employment scheme. By participating in the scheme, she would have seen her weekly payment increase from 100 euros a week to a princely 200. Although going on the scheme obviously seemed like a no-brainer there was a catch; in order to do this, she'd have had to leave her home in Kildare and relocate to Dublin, due to some bureaucratic such and such. Even with the increase in her payment, finding somewhere to rent in the capital wasn't going to be easy for someone on Keren's budget.

“I found a shared bedroom in a housing estate across the road from a heroin dealer. It was probably the dodgiest place in Dublin but it was only 280 a month. Grand.” Keren rounded off her summary of the situation with an adjective that wouldn't have come to my mind if I'd been I'd been asked to describe it. “The day that I moved in, I went down to the local social welfare office and they told me they wouldn't accept it because I was subletting the room, despite me having phoned that office twice before to ask if subletting was alright and they had said it was fine. So suddenly my money was suspended. I had rent to pay on my office two days later. I nearly broke down in the dole office
I remember just going “what do I do, how do I survive, how do I pay my rent?” and the guy behind the window was like, “to be honest with you......your only option is to declare yourself homeless and get an emergency homeless payment.” I just remember staring at him and saying “you realize that that's going to cost you guys more money
to keep me in a homeless shelter, after I've already paid my first month's rent in a new house, instead of just giving me my social welfare? And he said, “I know, but that's still you're only option, that's the system.”

The ridiculous situation seemed even more hopeless when Keren learned that same day that as a new arrival in Dublin she wasn't entitled to a place in any of the shelters run by the city council. At the last minute, she discovered there was still one shelter left that was run by the Catholic Church and wasn't subject to the same rules. “They were very reluctant to give me the space as they told me that they normally only took people with addiction or mental health issues. It was like I wasn't fucked up enough to be deserving of help. I thought that was so wrong. I consider myself very blessed that I got it in the end, to be honest. I'm classified as homeless because I don't have any other address anymore – but at least I've never had to sleep on the street.” Her eyes darted towards the window and she shuddered, echoing the thoughts I'd had that evening.
 

 

“I was terrified the first time I went in” she revealed candidly. “You hear such awful stories of homeless shelters. I remember for the first three days I faked a thick Dublin accent. I was scared to talk like a middle-class Irish person, I was afraid they'd think I was soft and an easy target. I really laid it on thick at the start, trying to seem tough to assert my authority. But it began to change gradually. One night I went outside to have a cigarette and I started talking with one of my housemates. She asked me lots of questions about myself, oh who are you, why are you here, blah, blah.
And I felt quite comfortable with her. I began to realize that these women were alright and gradually they just became my friends. They all know what I do and they know that I go off to my job every day. Every morning when I get up and I put my work clothes on, Erica, the woman in the room next to me, always says something like, oh look at you, you look lovely today, you're not going to forget us when you're all important now are ya?”

Shortly after the most recent BlueFire Street Fest, Keren had been invited to speak at an event called One Young World, a conference for young leaders of tomorrow (“not future political leaders, but people who want to make social change” as she was very keen to point out.) OYW's annual conference was being held in Dublin that year and Keren had given a speech on the importance of social integration. She had been introduced by Ali “Mrs. Bono” Hewson, whose husband's old mate Bob Geldof had been loitered on the side of the stage at the same time. “It was an amazing opportunity,” Keren said, not bothering to play it cool and try to hide her enthusiasm. “There were 2,000 people in the audience, 10,000 people watching online. Giving that speech brought up a lot of emotional stuff. I found it very difficult to articulate myself, I felt like I wasn't worthy to be on that stage, so that was a whole journey.” While speaking at the conference Keren had appeared on the TV news, an appearance that had caught the eye of one of her housemates in the shelter. “One of them saw me and she was like, oh I saw you on TV!” she said, laughing at the weird collision of her two worlds. “They're all very supportive of me. I like going back at night, I like seeing my friend's faces when I go home. They always warm my heart”
 

At the mention of the word “home,” Keren glanced down at her phone and insisted apologetically that the time had really come for her to go. It's good that at least something has been warmed I thought, as we both made our way down the stairs and out the front door back into the Arctic chill of the Dublin night. I quickened my step to keep up with Keren as she clip-clopped down the pavement, conscious that if she didn't make it back in time before the curfew that she might be facing a night out shivering on the street. “You know,” I said breathlessly as I struggled to keep up, “before I talked to you I assumed that everyone who ended up homeless in this country probably came from a poor background, or had an addiction or some problem like that.” “Oh no, absolutely not,” Keren said through chattering teeth. “It can happen to anyone. I met a mother and son recently who had run a catering company. She used to be a chef in the Dail for God's sake! She's a highly capable person, she just lost her job and got divorced around the same time. It was just too many things going wrong at once. Some people live with abusive partners or family members and are in situations they just have to move out of, even if they've not been able to find somewhere else to live. And it doesn't have to be something that dramatic.” She stopped and leaned for a moment on the corner of a building, slightly out of breath.
“It can be someone who just grew up without getting the right encouragement. I mean one of the girls, in the shelter, Diana, we chat a lot and she asks me a lot of questions about my job. She's really curious about it, but....” She paused again. “I feel when I talk to her I see two things going through her mind. One is that I can see hope, hope for what could be, and I also see part of her telling herself “You can't do that, you're not good enough, you're not capable.” I don't know her background. Maybe she went through something terrible. Maybe she just wasn't lucky enough to have supportive people in her life growing up. I asked her once would she think about looking for a job herself, or even doing something voluntary like me and I got a point-blank answer “no.”She's just not ready yet. She needs time to just process, to catch up with herself. Deal with the issues, you know.”

We set off again at a more leisurely pace. “I've been very blessed with that” Keren said “my family were always very supportive of me, maybe too much so. So for someone like me who was very flighty when I was growing up, I was given lots of opportunities to try things and fail without feeling like a failure. I failed 200 times and that was why I've always been able to get up and try something new again and again.” As we rounded the corner and Keren informed me she was into the home stretch, it came time for us to go our separate ways. Keren set off on her own down the neon-lit street, passing an all-night supermarket, whose open doors beamed light and heat comfortingly into the freezing darkness.

 

A year later and I was back, standing only a few streets away from the spot where I'd left Keren. The contrast with that winter's night couldn't have been more stark, as the light from a warm Autumn sun beamed down through the handful of scattered clouds that were lingering sheepishly around the corners of a mostly blue sky. The light was illuminating a Smithfield Square that was as colourful as the frozen Parnell Street had been grey, its well-trod cobbles crowded with hordes of bright people milling about like tropical insects who had unexpectantly come across a hidden oasis in the middle of an urban jungle. Rows of tented stands stood side by side like a little village as punters queued up to buy from the artists and confectioners who were selling their wares. Rings of spectators formed around the little open patches of paving where performers went through their routines. A group of Asian percussionists clad in matching yellow T-shirts and headbands thumped energetically at exotic looking drums, a belly dancer twisted and twirled, a martial arts master tried out his skills on some unlucky volunteers and the smell of grilled frankfurters drifted through the air, accidentally doing the job of ensuring that the culture of Germany was represented in the multicultural mix. At the end of the square stood a large canopied stage, occupied at that moment by an Indian dance troupe who spun around in a circle, turning in sync to face the audience and then away from them again a moment later. I picked my way through the crowd carefully with Andreas in tow as we scanned the throngs for our elusive host. A gaggle of small children, dressed in black leotards and disconcerting golden animal masks, darted out in front of us from under one of the tents, with me only avoiding crashing into one of them by virtue of a last-second sidestep. The near-miss inspired Andreas to tighten his grip on his camera, despite the strap that secured it around his neck as if he feared it would be swept away from him in the tide of humanity. We eventually found Keren at the side of the stage chatting to one of the security guards. Unable to persuade her to stand still of us for more than a few seconds at a time, the rest of the afternoon was spent trying to keep up with her as she flitted from one miniature crisis that required her attention to the next. Andreas was forced to do his best impression of a wildlife photographer, taking his life (and his camera) in his hands on a number of occasions as he was forced to put his body between the swirling crowd and his subject in order to capture the image of her in her natural habitat. As the evening began to darken and the people to finally thin out he revealed in the greater freedom at the space gave him, insisting on just one more shot for the road despite my protestations that we surely had enough. He connected his flashbulb to compensate for reduced light and fired of a flurry of new portraits of the unsuspecting Keren as she was finally taking a moment to herself, laughing with a couple of volunteers in high-viz jackets. The flashbulb glowed white-hot, burning with an almost blue flame.