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DRIVING OVER LEMONS
Given the ban on travel because of the current pandemic, and a series of unfortunate events that have prevented us from even wandering around Ireland, I've taken lately to travelling vicariously through other people's accounts of their journeys and life experiences in various parts of the world. In this adventure we're off to Andalucia in the 1980s with the first drummer of the band Genesis (I bet he's sick of being described in that way at this stage), his wife and a menagerie of both human and non-human characters. This memoir is an easy read and if I'm to be honest it's suffering from a dated feel at this stage, even though the version I read was a 25th anniversary edition with an extra chapter (that didn't really add anything to the overall story).
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THE FAILED GENERATION
PHOTO: Franklin / AP “I was a child in the sixties Dreams could be held through TV With Disney, and Cronkite, and Martin Luther Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed Nanci Griffith – It’s A Hard Life I’m in my mid-fifties and I was a child of the sixties. I grew up with the momentum of foreign protests igniting protest marches in my own country aimed at restoring civil rights to minorities that couldn’t be distinguished by colour, but was based on religious belief. I enjoyed the hope of the technological revolution during the”power years” of my late-20s and early 30s. We enjoyed the drive for equality in a country that at one time lagged behind the rest of the developed word by a decade. Equality brought about by the kind of unity that EU membership offered a…
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IT’S ALL PORK PIES…
You know the old joke: “How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving!”. We’re about to embark on three weeks of a general election campaign where a lot of lips will be moving. The last time the Irish people went to the ballot boxes to elect a new government our economy was circling the toilet bowl and about to get flushed; we were told we the people would pay billions to bail out the banks; the Celtic Tiger was fed on a steady diet of greed and subsequently died from obesity; unemployment was heading for 15%; worst of all our sons and daughters had begun to revive an old Irish tradition of emigrating to anywhere but here. At that point the voters said ‘enough’ and booted out the same old crew that…
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CHRISTMAS (CHALLENGE #5)
Christmas is all about tradition, but not really. I think Christmas as a concept may be traditional in itself but what Christmas means to people can be very different depending on the individual and will inevitably evolve as time goes by. There are elements that remain constant; the exchange of gifts, the religious aspect, the decorations and of course the increased awareness of the bond between family and friends. In my experience all of these change with time and even though on the surface these elements remain in one form or another, often the meaning of them alters to take account of the circumstances and the journey we’ve taken along life’s road. Now that I’m a Golden Boy (don’t get too excited I just meant I’m in my fifties) my take on Christmas presents has changed considerably. Mainly…