Bookish pleasure
September was never a favourite month. To be honest, the pop song lyric, “wake me up when September ends” would have captured the mood of the first month of autumn. The summer was past, Christmas was a very distant prospect, the days were getting shorter and the weather was growing colder. There seemed little about September that might lift the … [continue reading …]
Would Paddy have still voted Fine Gael?
After nine years of Fine Gael government, would Paddy have been enthusiastic for a general election? Paddy was a member of Fine Gael in Mayo forty years, a Garret Fitzgerald supporter in the three elections of 1981 and 1982. Being the pharmacist in an isolated town on the western seaboard, there would be callers at his house on a Saturday … [continue reading …]
Bad lessons
“Don’t teach to the test,” said the mentor at the start of the teacher training course. Of course not, teaching is meant to provide a rounded education, it is meant to provide students with the knowledge and skills to fulfil their own potential and to become full and active members of society. There are lofty aspirations in school mottoes about … [continue reading …]
The old scams seem to work
There can be few people with email addresses who have not received at least an occasional email that seeks details that would allow the sender to defraud them. The “Spanish Hostage” scam is the oldest approach used (thus named because when it began two centuries ago people wrote letters claiming to be held hostage in Sapin and promising abundant reward … [continue reading …]
Being reminded of our place in society
The previous day, the long-suffering Richard had agreed to give my car a look over at eleven o’clock the next morning. With the garage closed over the Christmas and New Year period, he had found himself inundated with calls and suggested I return in an hour. It was a perfect length of time for which to wait – not long … [continue reading …]
Father of the upper cut
Back in my days as a theological student in the Dublin of the mid-1980s, I remember a story that would have seemed horrifying for many Christians. Members of a particular religious order were living in a very poor part of Dublin, struggling to work in a community beset by all the problems that went with the poverty of the 1980s. … [continue reading …]
Orwell was too smart to have a smartphone
“Would George Orwell have had a smartphone?” asks a page title on the BBC website. Without clicking on the link, there is no hesitation in giving an answer in the negative. The writer of 1984 would have recoiled at the idea of the control of the world’s information by a handful of major corporations. Computer-generated algorithms have the capacity to … [continue reading …]
Choones
It being the end of the week, Steve emailed staff with the Feelgood Friday tunes – three upbeat three minute songs. The sound of Northern Soul music filled the corridor past the humanities classrooms before 7.30 a.m. The similarity of bars from one song to the Trammps’ record Hold back the Night prompted me to go next door to Steve’s … [continue reading …]
Settling the account
This story was expanded from a piece of flash fiction. It was entered for this year’s RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Competition. The evening classes at the college gave her the opportunity. It was a computing class that had taught her to use the Internet, something of which she had been frightened. It had been the stories in the papers … [continue reading …]