Stories

Who are they? Where did they come from? And more importantly, who decided we needed their advice? Years ago, if you wanted to know something, you asked…

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” W. B. Yeats supposedly wrote that, and it is hard…

Breakfast when I was a child was a simple affair. There was toast. There was nearly always toast. Toast, of course, was less a food than a…

Before Nike, Adidas, and all the other multinational companies convinced us we were one pair of runners away from Olympic glory, we had these. The humble plimsoll.…

On my first day at work, I was still waiting for my school exam results. This was awkward because I had been promised a job as a…

I recently discovered that only somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population irons their bedsheets. This came as a considerable shock to me, because I…

There seems to be a natural order to family life. Little girls often adore their fathers, and little boys think their mothers can solve almost anything. Hence,…

In the 1960s, television in Ireland was fairly straightforward. There was one Irish channel, and if your aerial was good enough, high enough and pointed in the…

There were few luxuries available to Irish immigrant families in England in the 1950s, but one of them was the fizzy drink. Every few weeks, the Corona…

Now, before you get too excited, this isn’t a tale of debauchery. It’s about food. Like many of us, I’ve drifted into the modern world of sourdough…