International – Page 12 – For the fainthearted . . .

The delight of the post

Stepping into Errigal Road Post Office, I bought a book of ten stamps for national use. “That will be €11, sir,” said the cheery man behind the counter.

Post offices were once the gateway to happiness and adventure. They enabled communication that was otherwise not possible.

I remember booking holidays in France by post, using international reply coupons that could be bought in a post office. The coupons enabled writing to someone with an address in a foreign country and for the person to reply by using the coupon to …

Independent shops

Walking down the Long Mile Road and turning into Errigal Road, where Google Maps told me that I would find a post office, there was a moment of delight – K. Doyle, fruiterer and greengrocer. The establishment had a period shopfront and appeared to be thriving. Once everywhere had such thriving, independent businesses. In our village of High Ham, the village shop was owned by Simon Spearing. The Spearings were a couple younger than I am now when we moved to the village in 1967, but Mr & Mrs Spearing…

On the anniversary of Galileo’s telescope

According to Wikipedia it was on this day in 1609 that Galileo demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

Galileo is still popularly credited with the invention of the telescope. It was at a lecture in Trinity College, Dublin that I learned in no uncertain terms, that Galileo did not invent the telescope.

It seemed odd to learn that it was not invented for the lofty aspiration of exploring the heavens, but for altogether more mundane reasons. Galileo refined the telescope in such a way that he was able to …

They shoot horses, don’t they?

I used to love going horse racing. I never knew anything about horses. I would have tried to avoid being in close proximity with a horse. I have numerous allergies and horses make me sneeze, my eyes run if I approach closer than a few yards, but I nevertheless loved going horse racing. Well, what I really loved was the Downpatrick races.

The Co Down track was a real switchback course. The horses that ran in the races were rarely well-known. The jockeys would not often have been the people …

A colourful weekend

In France, this weekend was going to be red or orange. Saturday, 7th August was a red Saturday. There was a black Saturday two weeks ago.

The colours refer to the intensity of the traffic flow on the days marking the beginning and the end of holidays, the “bouchons”, those places where the thousands of vehicles travelling on the French autoroutes come to a complete stop, are all too frequent.

Growing up with the myth that the English worked harder than anyone else in Europe and that the whole of …

History teaches it is wise to avoid Afghanistan

The image was imprinted on my childhood mind, an exhausted man on a horse that struggled to remain standing. Remnants of an Army was inspired by the story of Assistant Surgeon William Brydon. Brydon was the solitary European to reach the British fort at Jellalabad, Afghan forces had massacred a British column of 16,000 soldiers and civilians under Sir William Elphinstone.

The first Anglo-Afghan war was fought between 1839 and 1842. Jellalabad was a familiar name for a schoolboy in Somerset because the soldiers at the fort to which Brydon …