Monthly Archives: October 2015

ALBERT Today that voice fell silent in the small farmhouse where he brought his bride some sixty years ago or more. A son and daughter grown and gone, ewes to lamb, a cow for the house on the small hill … Continue reading →

The house was at the end of a long lime avenue. The trees were old and in places they still met overhead and made an arch. There were gaps where over the years trees had died which allowed a view … Continue reading →

At boarding school, to relieve the tedium of our incarceration we greatly looked forward to exeat Sundays. These were two Sundays a month when we were free after morning chapel, until evening at eight o’clock. This was a boon to … Continue reading →

I could not believe it. In the exam at end of my first term of studying the language, the master had set the questions in French. I do not believe that in class we had ever put more than a … Continue reading →

A ripple of applause ran round the ground. The batsman tucked his bat under his arm, took off his gloves and walked towards the pavilion. What happened him? asked the spectator who had just arrived and missed the fall of … Continue reading →

They all play golf. All my friends play golf. The whole world, it seems, plays golf. I met a man at a funeral who started to tell me, shot by shot, hole by hole, a round he had played that … Continue reading →

A country rector in the Church of Ireland in the 1970s, depending on the parish, might have lived in a fine eighteenth century rectory. A house with graciously proportioned Georgian rooms with high ceilings, fine marble mantelpieces, and large windows … Continue reading →

Ten days passed and word came back from the military attache, that we were to go to the visa office, downtown Islamabad, and Mr Muktar Saeed was our man. It was thought wise that I should wear a collar and … Continue reading →

In Ireland in the mid nineteenth century we had what is sometimes referred to as the Hidden Holocaust. The deaths of the famine years when a million people died of starvation and a million more were displaced to Canada and … Continue reading →

When things are going well there is always somebody to go over the top. During the Celtic Tiger years the Irish singer Samantha Mumba appeared at a celebrity event wearing a diamond-studded dress costing some millions of euro. If it … Continue reading →

The Irish countryside is full of characters. That is, people of eccentricity or of particular personality. I would like to tell you about two of them I knew who lived within no more than a mile so of each other. … Continue reading →

Evolution, by its very nature, leaves extinct species in its wake. The evolution of farm machinery has left the breed farm labourer all but extinct. The old time farm worker did an honest weeks work for a modest wage. He … Continue reading →

If, as it has been described, the Church of Ireland was the Wild West of the Elizabethan Protestant Church, then Miler Magrath, Archbishop of Cashel, was its most notorious cowboy. In 1974 the retired Church of Ireland Bishop of Limerick, … Continue reading →