Blog

A Tale of Two Cities: Dublin and Zürich

My first footing in Zürich was just after Christmas, 1979. I had flown from Dublin which, in those days, looked permanently on its last legs. In Dublin you had the post-1973 oil crisis (and Iranian revolution) recession, the overspill of the Northern ‘Troubles’ and emigration. Zürich, a snarky German

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The Analogues in Frankfurt: Take Me to Your Lieder

  I have flown through  Frankfurt often enough. But it had been some twenty years since I had walked  its streets. The excuse was a concert by The Analogues. To call them a Beatles tribute band would do  injustice to both groups. The Analogues, with none of that

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Clerys is dead; Long Live Clerys

Clerys is dead; Long Live Clerys I associate the late Clery & Co (1941) Ltd. with several things: adolescence, the beginning of the Northern ‘Troubles’, further knowledge of the geography of Dublin and Dubliners. It was also the last place I visited with my mother, where she treated

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Mixing Modals in ‘Merica

The Twin Towers were still standing, in the late 90’s, when I arrived in ‘Merica for the first time. I spent a few days in upstate New York and then took the train down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I arrived on

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Back to Kos

I visited Kos from Bodrum, Turkiye, for just a day, a few months before the Covid damndemic, in 2019. I had a memory of a restaurant in a square and an elderly couple sitting under a tree chatting. And another memory of a nice bar and a tasty local

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Unfishing in Éire

On the River Barrow My Bavarian buddy arrived in a fussy little rental Skoda which, he told me from listening to it complain on the way from Dublin, had a problem with the main bearing. It wasn’t terminal, at the moment anyway, he added. We drove out to

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DUNE 2: Three Baldy Lads and a Girl on a Worm

Because I happened to be in Van, Türkíye, and I had missed Dune 2 in Dublin, Ireland, I went to the Turkish screening of the movie. It was in English with Turkish subtitles. I’ve never read the books. I do remember that every time I stumbled on Dune,

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Van, Eastern Anatolia, in the Light of Dune 2

Van’s main raison d’etre is Lake Van (Van Gölü). It is also tied in, historically, with the highly defensible position of Van Castle, towering high above what is left of Old Van, which went the way of all flesh circa 1915. Lake Van is a sodium lake with

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Snow was General all Over Ireland. Then Sleet, then Slush

‘   Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly on the bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling on the dark mutinous Shannon waves.’ The Dead  James Joyce   Joyce was right but the newspapers – along with the

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The Fourth K in Kars: Kahvalti

The Fourth K in Kars: Kahvalti See More Common sense, science and tasty food don’t often overlap. But in the Venn Diagram of Kahvalti, they do. Kahvalti means simply ‘under coffee’, telling us that the solid breakfast is eaten before caffeine is ingested. It varies from the simple

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