© 1970 John Maher. All Rights Reserved I got with Rory Gallagher’s music around the same time I got with Bach (specifically Brandenburg Concerto No. 3) and Sean O’Riada (specifically the album O’Riada Sa Gaiety, with its harpsichord substitute for Irish harp.) The three musical languages answered different
(https://www.focusfeatures.com/hamnet) I wasn’t much surprised that Jessie Buckley won her Oscar. She deserved it. If some insisted that her performance in Hamnet was overwrought (overwrit?), that was surely what it was meant to be. A mother losing a young child – hardly an occasion for being underwrought and
Last Friday week, there was a rare glimpse of late Spring sun in Dublin. Since there hadn’t been much early spring sun, it was greeted with something close to applause. Arrived up on an early train. I breakfasted in Wetherspoons, vaguely aware of the rugby shirts at the
I arrived in Zurich from Dublin to meet my friend, on a slushy Swiss morning. We had a coffee in the Hauptbahnhoff before catching our train southwards. Past snowscapes and lakes, to Chur. It was a little pilgrimage squeezed in during my annual general inspection of Zurich.
‘I heard you were down in Grace?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘What were you doing there?’ ‘Meeting the Grakes.’ As regards football, I am an atheist: I don’t really believe it exists. Thankfully, the Scottish football fan flying down to Athens beside me (AEK Athens and Aberdeen; score 6-0.)
Three things I knew about Lublin: there was a novel by the Nobel prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer called The Magician of Lublin, set in 1880’s Poland, it was a favoured location of Stalin for a post-war Soviet spyhole, the Vernichtungslager (formerly a
Warsaw Packed Weekend My itinerary was to be Berlin, Warsaw, Lviv, Lublin but other realities intervened and I had to cut out the overnights in Berlin and Lviv. I flew into Berlin on the Friday morning and killed/maimed a few hours in the east of the city. I
Borders always involve a difference in potential energy between the entities on either side of the divide. Or else you wouldn’t need them. And the flow of energy can go either way. Borders also mean business, both good and bad – from the pre-1989 borders in Europe, to
Barry Leaned On Barry (aka Redmond Barry) starts as a (gullible) broth of a boy and ends up as a bit of a bollox, with one leg missing a promissory note from his estranged aristocratic wife that will keep himself and his mother afloat until the grave. It
‘Oh, Jesus! His eye is gone, so it is!’ The hospital cleaning lady stared out over the counter at me. It was Cork city, mid-sixties, and I had just been ferried into the hospital after an encounter with a heavy wooden swing in a Cork park. A12-yr old,