I hadn’t been in Vistula-Oder land since the late nineties, which was less than ten years after the communists quit. The influence was still visible then in grumpy service, crumbling concrete and the gaudy Palace of Culture in Warsaw. This was the building that Stalin kindly bequeathed the
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
‘ 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