What follows happened. In real life. There are stories here that feature love, death, the Irish language, work and much much more.
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Being Questioned About the Death of My Child
It was a case of good cop/good cop. I was living in Sydney, Australia the day that my daughter died of a combination of pneumonia, a badly administered anaesthetic following dentistry work and her cerebral palsy. She died in the bedroom next to mine. I discovered her in the morning. She died in July 2005.
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In the Morgue with My Daughter
“Say it out loud”. I spent quite a while, swimming in drink, tied to the house like a wheel on which I was slowly being broken. Writing fiction means drawing on your life from time to time. I’d been writing a short story about a mortician. I took a break and I was back at
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A Crumb Goes To Work
My empty soul, my hypercritical mind assure me everything will go wrong. I’ll go wrong. My inner voice seemed to be that of a whiney teenager. I’m 60+ years old. Until a few weeks ago I was a KP (Kitchen Porter) and ‘potwash’ – the lowest form of life in the professional kitchen. It was
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Insomnia & Madness
Occasionally, a young, green, wet-behind-the-axons, an eager junior nerve ending is thrown into the fight, only to be made cynical and bitter the veteran funiculi in its weary fascicle. Real insomnia is a relationship wrecker, it’s a straight road to madness, it’s a hallucinogen, it’s a soul sapper. So, where’s the fun side? I sleep
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Learning Irish – An Introduction
Before I begin, there’s one thing that I have learnt about myself from this whole thing – and it also explained something to my wife about me. I tell long, tortuous stories where the story itself is less important than the ending. I always have, tá brón orm faoi sin (I’m sorry about this). Apparently
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Learning Irish – Part 1 – Duolingo sucks
In which DuoLingo gets short shrift. Let me begin like a churl. The Irish language (Gaeilge) is far from the beautiful, lyrical, poetic encoding of deep emotions and profound contemplation that some non-Irish speakers might like to believe. It’s a right bastard of a tongue to get your mind around if, like me, you’re a
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Learning Irish – Part 2 – Why bother?
“Don’t worry about this when you get started. Most Irish speakers won’t snap your head off for stumbling over a few intricacies as a learner”. “No one speaks Irish anyway, what’s the point in learning it”. I also look at my encounters gender and I encounter the seemingly terrifying síneadh fada. Many of the reactions
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Learning Irish – Part 3 – Fear & Bean
I’ve been to Irish weddings before in Dublin, Borris and Athlone. Back then I had no Irish to speak of, let alone to speak with. Here’s a fun fact. In Irish the word ‘Fear’ means ‘Men’. ‘Bean’ means ‘Woman’. Now there’s a valuable lesson in not falling for false cognates. These are words in different
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Hire Me
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A Childless Father’s Day
I realise that you can’t stop being a father once you’ve been one. Well, I can’t stop being a father.
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Darwin and the Aborigines
What you have to understand is that Darwin, unlike the majority of Australia, has a very visible Indigenous Australian population. I once had a conversation in a pub in Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, during which I was threatened with a beating and told that the indigenous people were happier and better off