Category Archives: International

Answers on a postcard

For the fainthearted . . .

Facebook gives the opportunity of pursuing random fascinations, non-league football, French rugby, and trains form the bulk of the posts that fill the feed.

One post from a railway group this morning caught the eye, sitting drinking a cup of tea, I read and re-read it.

It seemed to capture a moment in time, to make timeless an interaction between an aunt and her nephew. Perhaps it also catches the spirit of a time.

The card asks so many questions.

Puffing Billy was already more than a century old, but …

The criminal type

For the fainthearted . . .

‘I’m not the murdering type,’ declared the murderer on Lewis.

What a strange notion, that there is a ‘type’.

It recalled a conversation in Sainsbury’s some five years ago

‘I was looking for a computer external hard drive. I can’t see one on the shelves.’

‘We only stock two sorts.’

‘I only want one, and I can’t see any.;

‘They were here.’ He had perused the shelves of miscellaneous computer accessories. ‘No, I’ll have to go to the storeroom.’

He had disappeared through the double doors of the stores; minutes …

Sharing slogans

For the fainthearted . . .

Frequently, social media carry advertisements for slogan tee-shirts. Slogans saying things like “stop plastics” or “save our oceans.” The advertisers of those shirts did not seem to appreciate the irony of adding to environmental pollution in the name of saving the planet; or perhaps they just didn’t care.

Presumably, there will be a significant market for tee-shirts which declare the wearer’s opposition to plastic; though the same person will probably shop in a supermarket filled with plastic packaging, and will have a house filled with plastic electronic goods – including …

A sacred book

For the fainthearted . . .

Among the books bought during the summer was A.C. Grayling’s A History of Philosophy. It will probably not be read until next summer when the long Irish summer holidays offer the quietness and leisure to engage with Grayling’s presentation of the thinkers and their their thought.

Published by Penguin, it is a book with a cover that is aesthetically pleasing. Penguin Books have always seemed attractive. There has often been a temptation to buy copies of vintage Penguin books, no matter their condition, not for the purpose of reading …

Imagined facts

For the fainthearted . . .

Coming from a rugby match at San Sebastian’s Anoeta Stadium in August 2009, traffic was being directed away from the city centre. Thirty thousand rugby fans travelling in thousands of cars would have brought the evening traffic in the Basque city to a complete standstill and the diversions were undoubtedly a wise decision.

However, among the lines of vehicles from south-west France, there was a black Citroen from Dublin, the occupants of which had no idea of how to return to Frantzia via the back roads.

Now  distant in the …

Mr Newhouse

For the fainthearted . . .

‘Xavier,’ said a friend. ‘Where does it come from?’

At the back of my mind there was a recall of something I had read. ‘The Basque country,’ I said, ‘I think it means ‘new house.”

It was something I learned more than a decade ago from Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World.

The world featured in the book is not the globe, but the Basque land, the provinces of northern Spain and south-west France where there is indubitably a sense of a distinct identity.  Kurlansky writes,

‘A

…