Category archives: All posts

Owp! (or “The Mother Who Came to A Crisis Point”)

have read Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea aloud many times. I have had read it aloud, perhaps, 6322 times. That’s no exaggeration. Or if it is, it’s only slight. I’ve read it in day-lit rooms. I’ve read… continue reading »

The Campaign Poster Debaffler: 8 – Gay Mitchell’s Quantum Head-Fuck

The presidential election. 15 days away. It will happen in a place/time called “the future”. A contested place/time that does not yet exist, or maybe does. We live, after all, in a time of uncertainty. I don’t mean a “Will… continue reading »

Brainstorm: Dawn of the Damp

Achill Island. 1999. A different decade. A different millennium. Driving, interminable rain sweeps in over Keel strand and down from lofty Slievemore. Dark thunderous clouds roll and boil in the grim skies overhead. And there, huddled and damp, in a… continue reading »

Family Album: The Terrible Agony of the White Phone When it Doesn’t Ring (Or Maybe When it Does)

There really wasn’t that much to do. Back in damp-priest-riddled, early-80s Ireland. Especially if you were a wife and mother. Choices were stark and choices and simple. And really limited. You could sit munching a communion wafer (or sucking an… continue reading »

The Museum of Cultural Waste: Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories

When I was a child I had a fairly good nose for moralising that masqueraded as entertainment. I’d see it coming. I’d spot the signs. A tingly sensation warning me that the adult world was trying to insidiously slip one… continue reading »

Knock Knock, Open Wide…

Much to the annoyance of my “Sasanach” wife, who says it’s nothing but a tawdry, second-rate knock-off of the glorious wonder that was Play School,1 our littlest one has become a hard-core Bosco junkie.2 This morning, as we sprawled contentedly… continue reading »

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