Personal Columns – For the fainthearted . . .

The road from Little Dribbling

Bill Bryson’s books were a source of many hours of happiness. His constant good humour and eclectic choice of subjects made his writing compelling reading. There were moments when his description of the absurd and sometimes surreal moments of his life prompted laughter aloud. More than once the sudden chortles have prompted others to look at me quizzically.

The Road to Little Dribbling was among my Christmas presents from my former wife at the last Christmas we were still together. It lay unread because I could not cope with humour. …

Searching for treasure

The theme tune from BBC television’s series The Detectorists is audible from my mother’s television. The series was one of those delightful productions of which only the BBC would be capable, a piece of whimsy that spoke to someone searching for elusive treasure.

If there were a theme tune to the disastrous four year relationship that brought an end to my marriage, my clerical career and my relationship with my daughter, it is the guitar playing and folk song voice of Johnny Flynn. The metal detector search of the characters …

Seven years

The Nineties are recalled in Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, they are times that seem now so long ago and so different that they belong to a different age. The story described is set in a pre-electronic age, when the world seemed steady, stable.

The Nineties in the story are set against a canvas very different from the beauty of the Co Down coast and the tranquillity of a rural parish, but there is an inescapable sense that these times have gone forever, whether on the Lecale coast, or in …

Being behind the eyes

ITV 3 had yet another old episode of Heartbeat. The police sergeant’s wife had developed a severe psychosis and the backing music used was Behind Blue Eyes by The Who.

The song was the most memorable among those played by The Who at Marlay Park in Dublin on a June evening some seventeen years ago.

The Irish rain had stopped for a couple of hours and the crowd of 30,000 were transported through decades of music.

Among the casual concert goers, there were real aficionados. One twenty-something was a …

No second chance

Being 64 next birthday, there is little to be spending money on. A rather battered thirteen year old Peugeot required €1,000 of expenditure in recent weeks, but otherwise a modest income is sufficient for modest expenditures.

The greatest anomaly in the budget is probably the £369 (£1 a day) it costs for the online annual subscription to the Financial Times, the world it describes is so far removed from life in west Dublin that it is sometimes like reading a fairy tale. Occasionally, though, world’s touch. Janan Ganesh writes in …

No longer a race for space

‘US Moon Mission runs into technical hitch’ says a BBC headline this evening.

To be honest, the entire space exploration enterprise seems to have hit the buffers fifty years ago. My boyhood self would have been very disappointed, space intrigued me.

It was maybe 1967; much earlier, and the moment would have been beyond memory; much later, and the occasion would not have have assumed the aura it still possesses.

My aunt, uncle and cousins were coming home on a visit – from Canada. In 1967, air travel was expensive, …