Meryl Streep, 9/11 and Mama Mia
Yesterday, September 11th, was the 17th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre; the day the world changed and nothing was the same again, either in the lives of those affected by bereavement, in peace and war and politics, in...
The Naked Domestic Servant
It is noon on the third of August and it is 36 degrees Centigrade under the French pre-Alps by Lake Annecy. I am naked in the kitchen, making peach ice-cream. I consider opening the window, but it is only 28.5 degrees in the...
The Moon In June
After June’s full Strawberry Moon had circled and set and the sun was shining, I was going out through the hallway of the Rives Parking in Geneva this morning as an elderly Sikh was coming in. His full grey moustache well kempt, he was dressed...
We Need To Talk About Ireland
The May morning after Savita Day, Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times newspaper tweeted “Oh god I just remembered all the Irish novelists and playwrights. What will they do now we don’t have shame and guilt anymore? Gogo in Godot: What do...
World Poetry Day “Back Up Quick They’re Hippies”
Today, March 21st, is World Poetry Day. Yes it matters, yes poetry counts. Now grown up, semi-responsible, semi-respectable, a member of the Establishment, property owner; over breakfast in Berlin on the second day of spring I read a poem which, in fewer than...
PAD WOMEN
The film “Pad Man” is a great story about a difficult crusade. Essentially, the person who endeavoured to bring sanitary towels to all Indian woman suffered physically and emotionally, lost his spouse and was shunned….though he did not regularly bleed. This is how women...
Connections : Art In The Wild
Many long moons ago, for a few short months, Peter von Tiesenhausen and I were neighbours in an artists’ colony in Banff. Full of the joy and excitement of fertile solitude, we also gleefully indulged in interaction with the other resident souls...
Celebrate the Silence of the Snowflakes
Dreams. The re-telling of which is, I am aware, of zilch interest to anyone apart from the dreamer. However, this might elicit amusement from Corkonians of the Art+Love circle; that wide but narrow clique from the Palace and The Group via the...