Why I Can Say What I Darned Well Please
I have earned my stripes. I was brought up in an Irish Catholic nuclear family. I went to a convent boarding school and was berated thus: “When a woman whistles, Our Lady cries” I waited ’till the builders came to renovate the dormitories...
The Romance of Cinemas
Cinemas are romance in so many ways, above and beyond even the magic of the silver screen; the fantasy, the possibilities, the beguiling landscapes and beguiling beauties, the lifting of the heart to music or dance or humour, the racing of the heart to...
Christmas is Custard, Custard is Christmas
Around our dining table were a Serbian woman, a German man, an East Berlin German woman, two Cork men and one Cork woman, three growing children (German by birth, Irish citizens by adoption) and one Eastern European baby girl. We three Irish people...
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...