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[endardo]

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…

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This One's About Memory, Dreams, Artificial Intelligence ... And Milkmen

Yes, we want to be happy. But just how do you do that, allow yourself to feel hope, when it hurts like a betrayal to feel optimism as so many suffer? 

These days, my brain is about as reliable as Fox News — and probably just as full of prejudices and fulminations masquerading as knowledge or expertise. Trying to fetch up names or beautiful things from my past, beyond the usual anecdotes, is a bit like dropping a fishing line into a black hole of a lake and hoping I’ll get a bite.  Too often, my hook will get snagged on some obscure flashback,…

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Cadillac Days And Pluck Those Nectarines

This Place Seemed Inviting And Immediately Familiar, And I Sensed Adventure Was Afoot.

What had once seemed an endless spool of daunting motorway had stretched out beneath us as we unfurled our way down our tattered map of France, but now the astral week of kilometres to Cadillac had finally shrank to earthly double digits, and our sagging optimism was revived. At last … a sign of things to come Driver Richie, Toby, Martin, and I, blearily elated at the thoughts of an imminent…

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Suspect Recollections And The Great Toby

Some call it embellishment, I just call it filing in the gaps, as best I can — and if the facts don’t always stand up, sure what about it? A good story is a good story. Anyway, isn’t that one of the good things about getting older, fewer witnesses to call you out on your tricksy memory bullshit? I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff recently with people of a similar vintage, younger even,…

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How The Hick Revolution Ended With A Bang

Johnny the Hick was living the life until the night Sergio with the raspy cockney accent and the notoriously short temper punched him in the gob, and knocked him clean off his bar stool. The Hick’s crime? Drunk out of his skill, he had started chanting ‘Sergio, Sergio, Sergio-o-o-o’ — in a raspy Cockney accent — when Sergio arrived into the light night cafe pub. Sergio was already well on the…

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Happy New Cheer

New Year’s morning, 2024.  Squinting crustily between the bedroom shutter blinds. A breaking day as dark and unpromising as the last one on the calendar yesterday. Hah! Drowsy and red-eyed I might well be, but sure don’t see no rosy-dawned new horizon out there, pilgrim. Not even the faintest echo of a clarion call to a fresh beginning. Paradise tomorrow, maybe, huh? So much for last night’s…

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Ze Bulb Is Kaput And Further Adventures Over Ze French Border

Off To France In A Battered Renault 16

These days, I feel a bit like old Charles Darwin, both of us sitting in our studies, sifting through all that stuff gathered on our youthful voyages of discovery, him on HMS Beagle, and me in that wine red Renault 16 that drove all the way from Holland to France that first time.  The Beagle Has Landed …. Charles Darwin I thought we would be in Cadillac, and Loupiac, and Verdelais, and all those…

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Ze Bulb Is Kaput And Further Adventures Over Ze French Border

One of the most joyful of all the writing mysteries is how you can start off on topic, just putting down what you had mapped out in your head —  but you end up writing something else entirely.  It’s like you let go the oars, or at least stop steering, and just go where the musings and the swells take you. You are all at sea, only in a good way: it’s like you’re watching your own show. These…

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From Bottling It At Baileys To Bailing Out For Breda

So, with teaching crossed off on the single line of my possible careers, and no-one around who might give me a steer — or who I would have heeded anyway — I headed off to Dublin City.  Moved into the box bedroom in the house my oldest brother was  sharing, which was owned by a Civil Service pal of his. Don’t ask me where I heard about it, but there was work going in a nearby enough bottling…

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Looking For Freedom And Solsbury Hill

To get to the rise and thrall of my dangerous liaison with blue-eyed Marine from Nantes, we must head off again to France — but first let me tell you how young Master Me actually got there the very first time.  What a wheeze it was, a battered but solid old Renault 16 bought for 400 guilders (about £200) between four of us from a guy in Breda, south Holland, where we were all holed up, and hot…

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Un Train Peut En Cacher Un Autre (One Train May Be Hiding Another) 

Ah yes, this dewy-eyed tale of a young man when he lived and worked in rural south-west France, and his return there as an older man to meet an old friend.  A tale with any number of possible starts or departures. Attention, doors now opening, for here is yet another: this train we have been riding on, as the “painted stations whistle by“, each thing passed “a glimpse and gone for ever”, as RLS…

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It's Been A Card Day's Night

“Cash or card?” smiled the cheerful middle-aged women at the pay station in my local Supervalu, redundantly, as I aimed my golden bank card chip at the machine that goes ‘ping’ — shades of the hospital scene in Month Python’s The Meaning Of Life. I just had my bank card, so no Loyalty Card to tag on. Disloyal, I guess. “Do you know what, I actually can’t remember the last time I had cash on…

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Summer In September — Part 5

Sure, wasn’t it like our own French movie establishing shot each morning as we opened our cooling bedroom shutters on to the already warm and luminous sprawl of trees, shrubs, picnic tables, sheds and bric a brac below — including Joel’s old cement mixer — and the dip down to the little stream 100 yards from the house, while one or other of their three cats (mother and two daughters) lolled…

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Summer In September — Part 4 

In truth, Joel had no need for the meagre skills I had to offer — I was, and still am, about as useful as a chocolate fireguard when it comes to handyman stuff — but he was working alone at the time, and just was not cut out for the silence of a solitary vocation.  I came to realise I was like the apprentice in the old Irish story, ‘Gioraíonn Beirt Bóthair’ (‘Two Shorten The Road’) about the…

[endardo]

Summer In September — Part 4 

In truth, Joel had no need for the meagre skills I had to offer — I was, and still am, about as useful as a chocolate fireguard when it comes to handyman stuff — but he was working alone at the time, and just was not cut out for the silence of a solitary vocation.  I came to realise I was like the apprentice in the old Irish story, ‘Gioraíonn Beirt Bóthair’ (‘Two Shorten The Road’) about the…

[endardo]

He's No Doris Gump

My first thought when that All Blacks bomb fell from the sky on top of Caelan Doris, late on, and he dropped it, was of course to be reminded of the helpless anguish of all those looking up into a flaming middle-eastern sky as those Israeli bombs fell on Gaza. If only — shamefully, I actually roared at young Doris, for committing such a heinous act in Ireland’s greatest last 10 minutes of need,…