International – Page 10 – For the fainthearted . . .

Waiting for the arrival of the enemy

The British Prime Minister was on the news again, addressing the nation about the situation (presumably in an attempt to divert attention from his own double-dealing and corruption).

It is twenty-one months since the situation began. Sitting in school with no more than a handful of students, there seemed an air of unreality. The sun was shining, the spring had come, everything was in bloom, what shadow could there be?

At the time, I remember looking for Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Iron in the Soul. A piece of existentialist …

On being someone else

Walking across the playground, a group of First Year students were returning from their break.

“Are you from England, sir.”

“I am,” I said.

“Are you really?”

Why is it so hard to convince people?

Holding a British passport, being a monoglot English speaker, having only attended schools in England: to someone who probed, it would hard to maintain the pretence of an Irish identity, (anyway, all anyone would have to do would be to type my name into Google and check the full story), but people make assumptions.

Re-invention …

The rules of the game

Just when I thought I was beginning to master the rules of rugby, there were significant changes again at the beginning of this season.

A well-played game of rugby is like a game of chess, there is a need to move the right pieces to the right places, however, it seems to come with many more rules than chess.

The World Rugby website outlines the twenty-one laws of the game. More complicated than the written laws are the forty-odd referee signals. Even the World Rugby video of each signal seems …

House!

According to the radio, it is, it seems, the anniversary of the game Bingo. On this day in 1929, it is alleged the American toy manufacturer Edwin S. Lowe rebranded the game Beano that he had encountered in Georgia and launched a worldwide phenomenon.

The claim that Bingo was only ninety-two years old seemed dubious and an online search revealed the origins of the game to be of far greater antiquity, its roots being in Italy in around 1530.

The name of Sixteenth Century game Il Gioco del Lotto …

Netflix nonsense

Making a cup of tea, a flatmate was watching Netflix. The dialogue caught my attention. Rather, a monologue caught my attention, one that immediately prompted a Google search.

A soldier is in what appears to be a maximum security cell and someone in authority comes in the cell to speak to him. The search term “only 15% of British soldiers fired their guns” immediately allowed the programme to be identified as Men against Fire, an episode of a series called Black Mirror. The monologue is reproduced in full on …

On the road south

At eight o’clock on a November evening, with John Creedon on the radio, driving northward on the M50 was an almost pleasant experience. Heading southward on the other carriageway, there was a convoy of three lorries with an escort vehicle in front of them. The loads on the low trailers seemed to be huge cubes of metal, perhaps electrical transformers.

Perhaps they were moving in the evening because the roads were free-flowing, perhaps their permits only allowed them to travel in the night hours. It was impossible to guess where …