MY STORY
THIS IS WHERE I LET YOU SEE BEHIND THE CURTAIN AND YOU REALISE THERE ISN'T MUCH GOING ON BACK THERE AFTER ALL. IT'S ALSO WHERE I FEEL MOST UNCOMFORTABLE. SO NOW YOU KNOW.
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Memories….An Urban Myth
The prompt was – what was your earliest memory of being in danger? Well I can’t tell you that but I will tell you about the time I was nearly abducted by an urban myth instead. I lived for the first 3 years of my life in a local authority house on the northside of Dublin. The house was nothing special – what suburban terraced house is – but it was home and it was safe, or at least that’s what I thought. It appears though that it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was. As the story goes, shortly before we moved across the city to another end-of-terrace house in a very similar local authority estate, I was rescued by the quick thinking of our next door neighbour’s daughter. Apparently I was standing on the…
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The God of Small Things
All my life I’ve had a problem finding value in the day-to-day actions of everyday life. It’s not that I craved constant drama or anything of that sort, in fact I tend to shy away from drama even when it’s a genuine crisis. I just never learned to worship at the altar of the God of small things. Maybe it’s repetition that causes me a problem, although I just spent hours over the past three days organising hundreds of music files by dragging them to new locations on a hard drive. Or possibly the lack of challenge involved in doing things that require little or no new learning. It could be the pointlessness of doing something, like cleaning or repairing, that will simply need to be done again and probably sooner rather than later. Honestly I don’t…
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My Signature: A Moviestar Moment
When I was promoted to what was to become my final role before retirement I had a momentary realisation that would make a small, but legally important, change in my life from that point on. I needed to change my signature. The role I was taking on, area manager for the local education and training board, would require me to sign multiple documents across a range of purposes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. The signature I had relied upon for the whole of my adult life up to that point was extremely legible and used a print based layout – letter by letter. It required me to lift the pen a number of times and more importantly was rarely used. I needed a signature that would be more difficult to copy and quick and…
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THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DASHA & KLAUS
Paparali (www.paparali.com) wrote a couple of posts profiling her “fur babies” and so I thought why not do the same for my canine companions, Dasha & Klaus. Dasha & Klaus are littermates (two from a set of triplets) born on 11th November 2013 in Kells in Co Meath – where the famous Book of Kells comes from. They’re a cross between a chihuahua mother and a kaninchen dachshund father. Kaninchen dachshunds are the smallest variety of the breed and the word “kaninchen’ in German means “little rabbit’. They were an “accident” when one of the kaninchen dachshund dogs used for breeding took a secret shine to the breeders family pet chihuahua (or she took a shine to him!). We called the female Dasha because the woman who bred them was Russian and that was the most popular…
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DUBLIN MADE ME…
Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals – O’Connell, Grattan, Moore – And the brewery tugs and the swans On the balustraded stream And the bare bones of a fanlight Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream And Nelson on his pillar Watching his world collapse. Dublin by Louis MacNeice I’m not really the sort of person who raves about his city or country. Largely because to a certain extent I believe where you’re born is pretty random when you think of all the decisions your parents made that led to the happenstance that dictated where your mother was when you were born. An example would be the fact that my parents planned to emigrate to the UK during…
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UNSUNG HEROES
When my parents died we avoided the tradition of delivering a eulogy at the funerals, largely at their request. It simply isn’t part of our family culture to stand up and sing the praises of either the living or the dead. To be honest none of us ever seek attention and despite the fact I’ve spent more than 30 years working in education, many of them in front of class groups, I too was reluctant to expose my emotions on the day. Sadly The Ban Cheile’s* father died recently and it was the binary opposite of my parent’s send off. The comparison made me think about the purpose of eulogising a loved one when they die. Ironically one of the things that I’ve been critical about the catholic priest when he celebrates the funeral mass was the…
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LIFE IS SHORT
“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” – John Lennon I blinked once and 20 years had passed. Okay I’m obviously exaggerating to make a point but you can see where I’m headed. I remember thinking when I reached 50 that I had passed the point where I had lived for more years than I could reasonably expect to continue living (negotiations are still open on that one but high hopes indeed!). It was a negative thing but it was a bit of a wake-up call because for most if not all of that time I was planning what I would do with my life. There I was at half a century and still thinking about what I’d like to be when I grow up. You can, of course, take that either of…
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THE STONE
I recently wrote a post about a semi-conscious image that intrigued me enough to write a short “poem” posing an important question. The image was based on the notion of whether I believed I was best represented by a stone, a rock or a mountain. I wanted to use the imagery to make me think about how my current journey through life might be seen and therefore where this journey might lead me from here. The more I thought about the three elements of this image the more I realised each one had something to teach me and so I thought I’d see what lessons seeing myself as a stone, rock or mountain might open up to me. “The stone is a mountain that stays on the move At the mercy of weather and wind Facing no…
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THE STONE, THE ROCK AND THE MOUNTAIN
There’s a stone in the road just turning and tumbling A rock in the river fighting the flow And on the horizon there sits a mountain Ignoring the passage of time The stone is a mountain that stays on the move At the mercy of weather and wind Facing no set direction it goes with the flow Every turn is where it will begin The rock makes a stand Is resistant to change But is willing to be weathered and worn And the mountain so high With its head in the sky Is detached from the waters below The stone or the rock or the out of time mountain The question is which one are you Tumbling or fighting or just plain ignoring The tides of life passing through Just as I woke this morning, in that…
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OPERATION LUGHNASADH
Lughnasadh is the name given to the Irish harvest festival and in fact is the Irish word for August. Many years ago The Ban Chéile* and I decided to rename the cottage in the country Lughnasadh (pronounced loo-na-sa) for a number of reasons – 1) We didn’t like the name it came with “St. Jude’s”, 2) It was a major fixer upper and at times it seemed like “lunacy” to try (get it?) and 3) we planned to spend our Autumn years there when we retire. The name stuck, but only in our heads. The name on the gate stayed and a lot of work took place over the intervening years, but Lughnasadh remained the name for the final product rather than the current cottage. Operation Lughnasadh got underway for real at the start of last autumn…
