The built-in loneliness of parenting
Category Archives: Published
What’s the story, Hollywood?
Tables turn in the battle of the vanities
Full article url: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/parenting/a-hair-raising-early-morning-row-over-chairs-and-mirrors-1.3375226
All at sea with a hormonally turbo-charged teenage daughter
Full article url: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/parenting/all-at-sea-with-a-hormonally-turbo-charged-teenage-daughter-1.3357619
Walking Dublin city blues
St Patrick’s Park, Dublin … where the soft drift of mellow voices wafts over me.
Summer girls in summer dresses and young men rippling with confidence and expectation. They are the ones I mostly notice anyway on this rare sun-splashed day in Dublin city as I revisit old haunts and take in new delights.
An unhurried man in my inconspicuous fifties, I am invisible to these youthful creatures as I stroll up the broad O’Connell Street boulevard. Continue reading
Finding daddy’s soft Spot
(Short story broadcast on Tramore Community Radio, July 2016)
I was only eight years old and deep in the fretless days of an untroubled boyhood – but copped on enough not to be completely taken in when old Pop Linnane asked if I wanted to keep his dog Spot.
Granted this little wiry white-haired terrier mix with the black patch over his right eye had been practically living at our place, but I knew Pop’s generosity had more to do with the fact that Spot had a penchant for going at adults, especially ones dressed in black.
And our town was full of nuns, priests and Christian Brothers.
Pop – Mr Linnane to his face – was probably in his late Seventies then, but to me he was just vaguely ancient. Like Methuselah without the long beard. He always wore a grey gentleman’s hat, and was only bald every Sunday during 9.30 Mass.
An Irishman’s Diary: what Freud taught me about putting
(The Irish Times, March 11th, 2013)
It was very early and there was no-one else there – the whole manicured green wilderness before me was mine!
I was playing quite well early on and mind and body were light and blithely unencumbered. But around the fourth hole a spectacularly wayward drive followed by a fluffed recovery from the gnarling rough darkened my mood just a bit.
