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MEANWHILE…#6
This is what I’m getting up to lately… Reading: Reached my Goodreads challenge of 52 books in 2025 but I found I wasn’t enjoying some of them as much as I should because of the challenge aspect. So this year I’ve reduced it to 26 to see if that helps. Coming to the end of Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series. Loved every minute of this series and can’t wait for the final ever instalment due – book 17 – out next month (sadly the author died in late 2024). Watching: Having binged all of the Vera and Shetland series in 2025, we’re currently on season 5 of Endeavour the prequel series to the excellent Inspector Morse saga. Every bit as good as the original. Listening To: Practically no music of late. Just not in the mood. Although Spotify set my listening age…
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Must Try Harder
Thinking About the “Art’ of Retirement I’m a little more than 4 years into my early retirement at this stage. The early bit is relevant because somewhere in the back of my head I felt that retiring 5 years early meant I could take my time settling into my post-work world and have it sorted by the time I would have retired under normal circumstances at age 65. Needless to say, having it “sorted’ by any age I now know is a fallacy that only someone who was ploughing ahead with a fairly responsible job would think possible. Experience continues to be the great teacher, but experiential learning is time consuming and can be stressful. Precisely at a point in your life when time, measured in years, is shorter than ever, and stress is debilitating. Critical Inner…
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The Next Big Pandemic: Xenophobia
Fear of foreigners is contagious and a valued political tool. I hope you forgive the title for this article on the grounds that xenophobia1 is not a medical condition, but to my mind it is a sickness. It’s believed to be governed by the area of the human brain called the amygdala, where a fear reaction triggers the fight or flight response and is regulated in the pre-frontal cortex. “The prefrontal cortex is a large and complex part of the brain that is involved in executive functions, such as planning, decision-making, and self-control. Many psychiatric disorders and neurological conditions are associated with deficits in cognitive control (CC) and/or dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex (PFC)2”. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider xenophobia as a sickness based on an irrational fear of the ‘other’. I need to think of…
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The Indian Lake Trilogy
A Reflection on Stephen Graham Jones’s three novel Indian Lake trilogy Stephen Graham Jones took me to school and back with his Indian Lake trilogy. Straight up I have to say I never thought of myself as a slasher fan, since I didn’t feel I levitated towards body horror in movies. There were the odd exceptions – the Scream series, Halloween series, Nightmare on Elm Street movies and of course the Scary Movies because my other half and I both found them hilarious. But I’ve never seen any of the Friday the 13th or Saw franchise for example. I also never felt I was missing anything either until I read the Indian Lake Trilogy and was introduced to the concept of the Final Girl, and more specifically Jennifer ‘Jade’ Daniels. That is to say perhaps my preference…
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Sympathy, Empathy & Meme Talk
I remember when sympathy was seen as something worth offering. You certainly were expected to offer it to people when they lost a loved one, fell on hard times, lost a job, or were ill or in pain. After all if we needed a measure of how important sympathy once was we only have to look at the volume of sympathy cards in card shops – Hallmark certainly still has faith in its place in the world. Full disclosure: I’ve never been very good at offering sympathy. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel sympathetic when I encounter people in any of the aforementioned scenarios, I’m not a psychopath (maybe), I just never feel comfortable actually sympathising with them verbally. Funerals are the worst. I can never join the queue to shake hands with the…
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King & Connolly: Passing On The Road
Never Flinch & Children of Eve Made Me Think I’ve been reading Stephen King since he published his short story collection Night Shift way back in 1978. That book led me to devouring his previous novels in quick succession – Carrie(1974), ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) and later The Shining (1977) (well in the case of The Shining maybe not devour since I never finished it*), and everything he published since then. I discovered John Connolly and his main character, Charlie Parker, when I took The Wrath of Angels on holiday with me in 2012. It was the 11th novel in the Parker series, but the synopsis on the back assured me it wasn’t necessary to have read the previous 10 to enjoy this book and it didn’t lie. I began to read the others in the series from…
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Thoughts, Decisions & Feelings
Earlier this week I needed to take a right turn up a country road that takes me home (queue the music). Keeping in mind we drive on the left here in currently sun kissed Ireland, that meant I had to cut across traffic. Normally that might involve avoiding a sporadic car driving too fast around the oncoming bends, but on this occasion there was relative gridlock because of a slow moving farm vehicle stacked high with something wrapped in plastic (I live in the country, I’m not a country boy – like John Denver for instance – even though he was in fact an army brat and not a farmer’s son). A very nice young woman decided not to continue in the funereal procession and stop to let me through. Commendable you might say and you’d…
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Sinners the Movie: But What About the White Guy?
CAREFUL: SOME MINOR SPOILERS I already knew before I started watching Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” that there was a vampire in there somewhere and if the word vampire even appears in passing, I’m in, both feet, and up to my neck – if you’ll pardon the pun. My first tingle of connection with the legendary blood suckers was when in my pre-teens I discovered a road near to my then home was named after Sheridan LeFanu, writer of the vampire novel “Carmilla”, which predates Stoker’s Dracula (another Irishman). The road led down a steep hill to the little village of Chapelizod, where LeFanu lived for a time and even set some of his stories. I’m fairly certain I wasn’t aware at that stage that Carmilla was the first depiction of a lesbian vampire in modern western fiction,…
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Neo:Sage
In my somewhat extended transition towards a better planned retirement, I have established a brief with two primary objectives. Firstly, I aim to preserve the strengths, knowledge, skills, and general wisdom accumulated over more than six decades of life experience and overcoming various challenges. Secondly, I intend to avoid adopting a nostalgic perspective that negatively compares the present and future with potentially idealized memories of the past. In effect this means combining the ability to keep up with current developments and cultural changes, while leveraging the benefits of experience. In that light I’ve decided to give this approach a title – NeoSage. It’s not new I’m sure but it makes it easier for me going forward to discuss my approach and evaluate its effectiveness without using lengthy explanations. There are two key elements to this approach –…
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Thoughts on Retirement
It’s NOT All About the Money Having surfed the internet for a long while now I can confirm most of the content produced in relation to retirement is about getting the finances right before you take the leap. That is an understandable perspective and is justified given the vagaries of the economy over the past couple of decades. I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy in many ways and like a lot of people of my generation I never got involved in stocks and shares or speculation of any kind. I saved when I could, paid my contributions to my work pension scheme, and kept my fingers crossed. I’m not recommending that as a strategy, but it was how I did it. At times in the years running up to my anticipated retirement I was so sure I…
