Personal Columns

Sitting in a seafront pub in Bray on Friday night, an excellent female duet sang old R & B songs for the couple of dozen customers who, for the most part, paid little attention.  Unlike the produced, packaged and computerised stuff that now trades under the name of music, there was  genuine talent and freshness.  Sitting on a table watching them sing Bill Withers’ 1971 song, ‘Ain’t no sunshine’, there was the sudden realisation that I was meant to be catching the train.    “I must go back sometime and hear…

Ireland

“Everything is possible and almost nothing is certain”, said Vaclav Havel in 1994.  The then Czech president was trying to capture the mood of the times; trying to define a view of the world described as postmodern.

The Wikipedia page on postmodernism quotes the Italian medievalist and semiotician (and excellent novelist!) Umberto Eco who characterised “the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she…

Spirituality

The Donny Osmond version remains in the mind: ‘The Twelfth of Never’.  1973, I think it was.   The declaration of undying love wasn’t really rooted in chronological time though, was it?  It wasn’t a case of the young pin-up making a lifelong commitment, at least it didn’t seem like that.  It was more that the moment was one outside of time, a moment that would remain there long after chronological years and human decay have swept away whatever there was between the lover and his beloved.

Isn’t that what it…

Ministry

In a West Country childhood, there were always magical stories.  There were tales of people who had met Merlin, the great wizard, keeping watch should he need to rouse Arthur and his knights from their earthbound slumbers.  Should they again need to ride forth, everyone knew they lay in wait in Cadbury Hill.

In Somerset, there were there knights in shining armour who would ride back from the dead in the moment of need and, in Devon, a navy waited the hour when it would again put to sea.

The…

Cross Channel

A Google search for the death of King George V suggests a reluctance on the part of the British media to comment upon the circumstances of the British monarch’s final days.  The New York Times online archive has its report from 1986 of the revelation, fifty years after the event, that George V’s doctor hastened his end.

As he lay comatose on his deathbed in 1936, King George V was injected with fatal doses of morphine and cocaine to assure him a painless death in time, according to his

…

International

• KENYA AIRWAYS – KQ 101
• WED 28APR      LONDON GB        HEATHROW           2000
• THU 29APR       NAIROBI KE      JOMO KENYATTA      0630

• KENYA AIRWAYS – KQ 448
• THU 29APR     NAIROBI KE      JOMO KENYATTA         0810
• THU 29 APR    KIGALI RW        KIGALI INT’L                  0835

The charge came though on the credit card.  tickets for Dublin to London, London to Nairobi, and Nairobi to Kigali, for less than the price of a package holiday to a Spanish Costa.

The trip is for work, to visit projects and to talk about developing…

Church of Ireland Comment

. . . actually, it is worse than that.

Not knowing who the Beatles were in the 1960s would have had little impact upon the reality of daily life.  It might have left one open to mockery, but it would not have affected how one communicated, how one did business, how one heard news, how one went shopping, how one managed one’s finances, how one presented oneself to the world.

As great as the Beatles were, their influence did not change the way we lived.  The Internet, on the other…

Monologues etc

A Hyacinth Bucket character encounters a distasteful scene

Really, it wasn’t nice. It wasn’t nice at all.

I was just saying to Leonard, my husband, that it wasn’t nice. Leonard has just retired as an important civil servant and he knows about things. He agreed with me, “Not at all pleasant,” he said to me. “Not the sort of thing that decent people like ourselves should have to see”.

You’d think the Government would do something about it, wouldn’t you? I mean to say, if this sort of thing started…

Notice Board

From ‘Hurt for Haiti’:

Hey Folks!

On Sunday, 21st February, we are holding a massive event in aid of our brothers and sisters in Haiti who are in such despair.

We have a huge day planned with some top entertainment on hand. The venue is The Bentleys Complex- all the upstairs and downstairs rooms AND The Brazen Head next door. It’s going to be a great day out and for a great cause.

We’re gonna kick off around 3 in the courtyard with Jon Kenny and Mike Finn on hand…