Personal Columns – Page 9 – For the fainthearted . . .

No job and a Peugeot en panne

It is 31st August tomorrow, the last day for which I shall be paid.

I was on a one year contract and our school staff numbers were cut and my contract was not renewed. Applications for dozens of posts have been fruitless. I have had three unsuccessful interviews.

On top of the lack of work comes a light on the dashboard telling me something about a particle filter. I phoned the local Peugeot dealer and the man in the service department says I need to get it fixed, or there …

My last piece of magic

A small fraction of my books remains. The selection that has survived thus far is frequently random, there being no rational reason why one work by an author is still with me while another has disappeared. Just one book by Gabriel Garcia Márquez remains on my shelves One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Garcia Marquez was a Nobel laureate – he was also fun to read. The magical realism of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude allowed adult readers to escape into a world of imagination generally confined to children …

The last day of summer

‘What will you do for the weekend?’ asked my mother when I phoned her this evening.

I was confused. Had I forgotten something? I have a great propensity to do so. ‘The weekend?’ I asked.

‘It’s August bank holiday this weekend.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘in Ireland it’s the first weekend in August.’

If the English are about to have their August bank holiday, then the summer really is over.

The August bank holiday marked the end of the summer holidays during childhood days. It was a harbinger of doom, it …

Staying awake

Do you know those stories where the fairy godmother appears in a puff of smoke or the genie appears from the bottle and asks, ‘what are your three wishes?’ I know what my first wish would be; not to need to sleep.

Imagine how much more of life could be lived if so many hours were not spent doing nothing, it would be like having life a third longer, but more than that, it would allow you to make far more of the present situations.

Living with an old uncle …

Making a living

it would be more than a decade ago, for I was living in Dublin. I was walking down a road when an ice cream van passed in the fading light of a chill summer evening.

‘A hard way to make a living’.

‘What is?’

‘Being an ice cream man’.

‘Maybe it’s something you inherit. Your father did it, so you do it’.

‘Maybe. I don’t see many new vans’.

How many handfuls of coins here and handfuls of coins there would have been needed in order to make the effort …

Trying to understand

A teenage suicide prompted the conversation.

‘Well, if he hanged himself, he must have wanted to die’.

‘No, he didn’t.’ I said. ‘What he wanted was the pain in his head to go away and he thought that dying was the only way to escape from it.’

There was a look of incomprehension.

At one seminar on suicide prevention that I attended, one of the particants asked, ‘Why would a boy of fourteen or fifteen want to die by suicide?”

There was no answer forthcoming.

Feeling a need to make …