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Good Things Comes In Trees

I stared up into a tree I had often seen but never looked at.  Until now. I followed the arching grace and curve of its shimmering trunk and extravagantly naked lower branches. Multiple ringed arms reached up to hold aloft its rich canopy of a myriad yellow-green leafed open parasols, lit expertly from above by the day’s still ripening sun.  I gazed for the first time at the algae and moss…

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Do Not Go Dental ...

Nothing like lying back helplessly horizontal on the red leather dentist’s chair to make a man of my autumn years feel like an anxious little kid again.  This same older man who wakes every morning with a new ache or twinge, that could disappear in a minute or last a fortnight, and has a head that struggles to remember names and why I am looking in that cupboard but can never forget certain…

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One Red Rose For Francois

‘And suddenly you’re in love with everything’.  The words from Badly Drawn Boy’s gorgeous The Shining bubbling in my head as I jump out of bed, the warm early morning May sun already pouring in through the gaps in the bedroom shutter and ready to pour all over me. Get the cushions out on the bench in a garden aching for the sun’s pour after yesterday’s rare rainfall. The first red rose of the…

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Spring Fever

Spring is well sprung and this airy bright March morning is bursting with possibility. The daffs are swaying, and the blossoming buds are shooting towards us from the apartments on the far side of the green. On their way to school. Alive and kicking, this little cackling army of boys, mostly, ignore the berating buggy mom lieutenants in charge as they advance down the path, before dashing across…

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Lost In The Tower Of Trump

These days, I’m so frantically standing still I barely have time to scan the headlines or fuel my conspiracy theories. Then again, I hardly need to. Trump and co have so flooded the zone it really is hard to keep up, or know what the hell to believe anymore. Or who. Isn’t it enough to be working, bribing the kids and keeping TV, phone and overdraft expenditure this side of financially ruinous?…

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Poo Are You?

This latest Blogfuscation was going to be a Facebook post to our local residents group. About the gobshites … sorry, people …  in our estate who let their dogs out alone, and they poo everywhere.  The dogs, not the gobshites. Though they might as well. A firm declaration of dissent figuratively nailed to the door of our Residents Group page like Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses nailed to the…

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Enraptured By Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

I have just started Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, read maybe 40 pages, and already it has changed my life. Well, it made me want to resume my writing project anyway. We will get to that. As someone who ‘writes’  — that is, I want to be read, even paid for it, sometimes — I often get hung up on the process. In the process. As we all do, good or bad.  Is that the best word? Is this image…

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Amsterdam-Burst Of Dreams On A Schiphol Runway

“Tonight was the night the sad and lonely Ryanair pilot would end it all. Spectacularly. Taking down all those on board Flight FR3101 from Amsterdam to Dublin with him”. The flight my wife and I are on now — and the lines that pop into my head as we wait for air traffic clearance at Schiphol airport. And I didn’t even know I was nervous … Blimey! What a thought as I sit here, helpless,…

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‘Oh, I gave my last chance to you Don’t hand it back to me, WKD Blue No, WKD Blue. ‘ I know, I know, it’s Bitterblue, not WKD Blue… but definitely what Cat Stevens would have written if WKD Blue was around back in the day, before he went all holy and gave up the gargle altogether. Yusuf and his Technicolour Dream Hooch. WKD Blue is right: this wicked brew just blew my best chance ever of…

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This WKD Game

What A Wicked Game You Play, SuperValu Voucher People

‘Oh, I gave my last chance to you Don’t hand it back to me, WKD Blue No, WKD Blue ‘Cause I’ve done all one man can do Don’t pass me up, oh, WKD Blue Ah, WKD Blue’ I know, I know, it’s Bitterblue… but definitely what Cat Stevens would have written if WKD Blue was around back in the day, before he went all holy and gave up the gargle altogether. Yusuf and his Technicolour Dream Hooch. WKD…

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This WKD Game

What A Wicked Game You Play, SuperValu Voucher People

‘Oh, I gave my last chance to you Don’t hand it back to me, WKD Blue No, WKD Blue ‘Cause I’ve done all one man can do Don’t pass me up, oh, WKD Blue Ah, WKD Blue’ I know, I know, it’s Bitterblue… but definitely what Cat Stevens would have written if WKD Blue was around back in the day, before he went all holy and gave up the gargle altogether. Yusuf and his Technicolour Dream Hooch. WKD…

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This WKD Game

What A Wicked Game You Play, SuperValu Voucher People

‘Oh, I gave my last chance to you Don’t hand it back to me, WKD Blue No, WKD Blue ‘Cause I’ve done all one man can do Don’t pass me up, oh, WKD Blue Ah, WKD Blue’ I know, I know, it’s Bitterblue… but definitely what Cat Stevens would have written if WKD Blue was around back in the day, before he went all holy and gave up the gargle altogether. Yusuf and his Technicolour Dream Hooch. WKD…

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Tomorrow We Diet

Make Peace With Obese … Or Gut Riddance To These Blubber Belly Blues

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Make Peace With Obese ... Or Gut Riddance To These Blubber Belly Blues

Shake the belly, as in shake it off.  I just can’t seem to shake off this monstrous protuberance that has lately risen from the gaseous depths of my own overworked entrails. Actually it’s been there for a while, but I chose to ignore it. Just blubbering … I mean blundering along. Eating and drinking away like in the days of my flat-bellied youth. It’s not like the signs weren’t there…

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Go On To Dingle, Ta Fuck!

Dingle? We just love it

So my sister and her older boy were in Dingle one evening recently, in what passes for summer in this whimsical wee country of ours.  The little Atlantic port town of Dingle, indeed the whole Dingle peninsula in southwest County Kerry, is a great tourist destination for Americans, mainland Europeans, and us Irish too. As they were ambling along the main drag, anyway, this young guy staggered…

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Who Is Mag Flash Anyway— And Why Shouldn't She Wear What She Likes?

About to leave to meet up with her four sisters in town for the youngest one’s latest birthday bash of the week, my wife had a last-minute fashion quandary:  “Which coat should I wear?” she asked me, sitting as I was at the kitchen table with a coffee. Occasionally called upon to submit my advice on these matters — she calls me Jean Paul (Gaultier) at such potentially bouleversant moments,…

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Sorry, Got To Dawdle, I Have A Dublin Bus To Catch

[I recently found the following piece, literally, in the bottom drawer of my work desk, read it and decided to blog it here, just as was written, well over 30 years ago. I lived in Sandymount, Dublin, around 1992-94, and I used to get the Number 3 bus in and out of town. It wasn’t the most reliable service, and it inspired the ensuing piece. This bus was supposed to come on the hour, and you…