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This is how far we’ve come. A random Sunday morning, and I’m on the grass strip alongside our house. Overseeing Lily the wonder dog’s morning sniff and poo.      Two boys from across the way come biking towards me on the cycle path that runs alongside the strip. Aged around eight or nine, I would say.     One of them is white, the son of a Hungarian couple we know and like very much. The other…

He turned into the park, and found himself heading for his favourite bench, in front of the gleaming lake.    He didn’t quite make it. He stumbled, again, but this time he let himself go down, until he lay on the grass, face up.    The grass was moist and Frankie sucked in a deep breath and smelled the damp earth and the rotting leaves all around him.      An all-too-earthly voice called to…

You have to kill your darlings. The kind of line we’ve all heard, those of us cursed and blessed with the urge to write a novel, or at least a decent post or story. The darlings being the words you have fussed over and finessed before finally etching them in what might as well be your own blood into the page — only to realise, or to have it realised for you —  that they are not working, and they…

Betting on sporting events: your bet wins or your bet loses, right?  You win money or you lose money. Win or lose. Couldn’t be simpler! If you are betting online, as I like to do — soccer football mostly and the odd golf tournament, and the very occasional horse race (relying on ‘expert’ tips, so largely unsuccessfully) — if you win your bet, the cash goes into your account with the gambling…

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…

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…

‘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…

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…

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?…

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…

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…

“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,…

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…

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…

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…

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