Personal Columns – Page 3 – For the fainthearted . . .

Truth is ugly

A meme on Facebook about beauty suggesting that Oscar Wilde would not have been impressed by a fancy car prompted me to respond that whilst Wilde might have been sympathetic to the sentiments, he had died before the age of the fancy motor car.

It brought the response, ‘only you would say that. Ian’.

Perhaps so, but can things be be beautiful if they are not true?

The words of Keats are recalled in a biography of war poet Siegfried Sassoon:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all.

A …

When words don’t work

Growing up in 1970s Belfast, my colleague recalls the bleakest days of the Troubles. There had seemed a terrible inexorability in the unfolding of the history through which he lived, as if there were no possibility of anyone ever calling a halt to the violence.

Drinking tea, we recalled accounts of a moment when all that was to follow might have been averted. Bernadette Devlin, a young and fiery republican socialist, had sat and drunk tea with Ian Paisley, the rising firebrand of loyalism. The stories of tea in china …

Cheap flights

Green plastic hair bands with plastic shamrocks attached to the hair bands by springs so that the shamrocks quiver at every movement by the wearer of the hair band. To contrast with the shamrock green, the wearers of the hair bands are all wearing rugby jerseys, in the scarlet of the Welsh national team.

At a fare of €16.96 (plus €29.99 for my bag), it is hard to complain at being surrounded by bobbing clover. There is consolation in the spring movers being sober.

Once, I was on a Friday

…

The colour of travel

Ahead of Morning Ireland and the seven o’clock news on RTE Radio 1, the presenter played The Great Defector by the Irish band Bell X1.

Approaching Ballyfermot roundabout, the refrain of the song was reached:

Comin’ into land and now, I
love the colour of it all.
Blue lights on the runway, I
love the colour of it all.

‘Enjambment,’ I thought. The continuing of a phrase from one line of a stanza to the next.

This year will probably be the only time in my life when I am …

Recoiling from voicemail

The parent-teacher meetings were conducted on Teams, a platform I hate. Calls were placed by clicking on a telephone receiver icon and the recipient would appear, sometimes just as a voice, sometimes as also an image on screen.

Thankfully, all but one of the calls was answered. The one that wasn’t went to voicemail. I hate voicemail more than I hate Teams. I am always lost for words.

I remember my first encounter with answering machines.

I was a twenty-eight year old rector of a traditional, rural Ulster parish and …

Bill at 90

Uncle Bill would have been 90 today. It is hard to imagine what he would have been like.

Bill to me was forever young. I remember it being a surprise when I discovered that he was born in January 1933, perhaps I just hadn’t thought about it. There are some people who always remain ageless in your mind. Bill and I went to the same Grammar School, Elmhurst in Street, except he started in September 1944 and I started a bit later.

Bill was far too interesting to get stuck …