At 5.30 am we pulled into the airport car park. A line of headlights filled up the spaces all around and men in suits rushed towards the shuttle bus. A man in his 60s, with white hair in immaculate waves and carrying a soft brown leather suitcase, stepped up onto the bus and sat in deep contemplation as the bus pulled off. The journey to Terminal 2 took only a few minutes and most of those aboard the bus stepped off, walking at a sharp space to join the long …
A moment of tiredness when contemplating flying from Dublin to Heathrow at 0640 tomorrow; it will mean leaving the Midlands at 3.30 am in order to pick up someone in south Dublin before driving around the M50 to the airport. The moment of self-pity was broken by a memory of Ros.
Born in 1909, Ros aged in body but never mind. Calling one afternoon at the nursing home where she lived, a place more like a family-run hotel from the 1950s than a 21st Century care establishment, Ros declared herself …
Conflict in Libya threatens to take Barack Obama down the path followed by George W Bush. It is a difference in style, rather than in substance, that has enabled Obama to avoid the hostility Bush encountered, for the American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US defense secretary is still Robert Gates, who held the post under Bush. Opposition to Bush was often no more than a thinly veiled anti-Americanism; a desire to rid the world of American influence, but a world without American power may not …
Watching BBC television’s ‘Waking the Dead‘ last night, with its tale of MI5 and British Government conspiracy and intrigue, was at once laughable and thought-provoking. The idea that MI5 were some dark and sinister force capable of achieving anything they wished is nullified in personal experience by living in Northern Ireland through fifteen years of the Troubles; the IRA could not be defeated, despite the years of changing security policy.
Yet conspiracy theories are always attractive, perhaps for no reason other than that they cannot be falsified. Evidence …
Trying to arrange the details of a summer holiday journey from San Francisco up to Vancouver in British Columbia brought memories of a history text book in school days that had a chapter comparing the West with the Communist bloc. A black and white photograph inset to the side of one page showed one of those huge 1960s American automobiles passing through a tunnel. On the tunnel wall, a vertical line was painted. To the left of the line there were letters on the wall declaring, “Canada”; to the right …
A Winnie the Pooh moment when walking through the castle grounds in Kilkenny.
A sign declaring what something was not. A concrete marker that one would associate with fire hydrants with a permanent sign affixed to it, ‘Fire hydrant not in use’. Would the simpler course of action not have been to have removed the marker? Perhaps the desire was to emphasize the negative, like the time when Pooh called at Piglet’s house and Piglet was out and ‘The more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there’.
Or perhaps …
