admin @ March 28, 2010 # No Comment Yet
The sign says ‘mind your handbag and belongings at all times’. Inside the church the women have shopping bags and care-worn faces. Each of them is here alone with god. I am here looking for Hynes.
He may not have believed. I don’t. Dreary coughing, the smell of wholesale cleaning fluids, tap-tapping boots under the […]
admin @ November 27, 2009 # One Comment
I drove across Ireland today beneath quilted clouds of grey. The only other colour in the world was green, and that was drenched in gloom.
Spits of wind lifted leaves onto the car. There was no swirling. From plough-black fields lone crows rose and fell. Above Strokestown hundreds of jackdaws swarmed. On village main streets solitary […]
admin @ April 17, 2009 # One Comment
My local swimming pool is beyond the woods, beside the school, surviving the 21st century.
Someone has defecated and neatly wrapped the result in black togs. It’s in the showers now, prone and glistening, it’s odour a fresh contrast to the scent of stale urine.
The mens’ changing room is often full of harassed women. They […]
admin @ April 5, 2009 # No Comment Yet
Her eyes are fixed on the tall man. I am close to them after the crush at Earlsfield and she has asked him a lot of questions. Her strange, inverse-shaped head it seems, is full of questions, and I don’t have room to read my paper. The man releases a punctured sigh before speaking.
“It’s about […]
admin @ December 8, 2008 # No Comment Yet
James Joyce said Zurich was so clean you could eat off the streets but he must never have walked up its alleys. It is a city for trams not tramps and after the three-kilometre walk uphill to the zoo and his grave I am sweating despite the cold. Crossing roads I get trapped on tram […]
admin @ October 30, 2008 # No Comment Yet
A recent acquisition of mine is The Pocket Dictionary of American Slang first published in 1960 after the combined efforts of two gentlemen, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner. Here’s a taste:
Baffle-gab: The ambiguous, verbose, and sometimes incomprehensible talk or writing often done by bureaucrats. Officialese.
Boom boom: A bowel movement.
Yatata yatata: Monotonous talk. Idle […]
admin @ October 20, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Praise to god left tangled in the trees above me by the whisper of a breeze choking in the maples. It deposits in the branches the distant hymns of a pentecostal choir at practice. With the light failing I watch the bats hunt, whipping through the air in crabby whirls. The brown-bellied squeakers stay close to […]
admin @ October 15, 2008 # One Comment
There is a dog for each house in the village. Mostly grey-muzzled veterans of guardianship lying on long chains outside barns or near chicken coups. On hot days they growl low in their throats when I pass, the heat too great to make a scene. But more days come now where the fog hangs on […]
admin @ October 8, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The Ecuadorians are going on holidays. He is a short and compact man with a low giggle that curls up into a sigh and a face well cultivated for his broad moustache. She is leathery and alert, with a pair of glittering white runners. They are happy to be on their way to the Canaries […]
admin @ September 28, 2008 # One Comment
My belt of twelve years broke. Twelve years. Not a nice round figure but there you go. Divisible by magic three, special to the Celts, pre-christian and post. Twelve. The buckle broke, the metal sheered and the belt, which has held up my trousers since I was 17 years old, became just a piece of […]
admin @ September 19, 2008 # No Comment Yet
There are 1,200 trees in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. Underneath one of them were three pebbles, two used metro tickets and a frayed plastic flower, placed carefully on the marble slab of Samuel Beckett’s grave. Not far away the grave of John Paul Satre and Simone De Beauvoir was covered in hand-written notes, pebbles and more […]
admin @ September 15, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The fish was swirling in the shallows of the lake shore. His dark shadow drifting slowly through the water. The nudists were lounging in the nearby shade of the woods. Their pallid arses bathed in light.
It was a bream. He was about four pounds in weight and and his dorsal fin protruded from the water […]
admin @ May 7, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Pembroke Lane is one of those Dublin lanes that still exist for the idly curious. The kind you find yourself veering off course to explore having walked past it a million times before. It was there I met Mr O’Donnell who told me about Patrick Kavanagh and the shit rolled in newspapers.
The lane forms the back […]
admin @ April 24, 2008 # One Comment
I’ve just finished teaching two modules of a Diploma in Journalism. It was my first time teaching. Every Tuesday for ten weeks I staggered down Clarendon Street with Lidl bags full of tabloids, broadsheets and mags, gobbled a sandwich outside the Maison de Gourmet, and had a coffee in the Library Bar.
Then around the corner […]