Indo col 72: There is an old story told about Topper Headon, the drummer with the legendary British punk band The Clash, from the height of his heroin addiction. Having been booted from the band for his habit, and thus losing his income, one day he strolled into his local pawn shop to flog an […]
Recent Posts
Soft play, silence, school, fight club
Indo col 71: As we head into the winter, it is time to familiarise ourselves once more with soft play areas. These pits of despair, if you are fortunate enough to not be familiar with them, are part building site (scaffoldings, netting, long tubes for waste/sliding) and a Victorian asylum (tattered padding, filthy conditions, shrieking). […]
Snap, snappin’, Snapchat, Satan
Indo col 70: It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that I realised I was old, but if I had to choose one, it would be when my teenage daughter tried to explain Snapchat to me. I kept asking stupid questions and trying to find a comparable site/app from Ye Olde Internette of the 2000s, […]
Arise
The Giant’s Grave near Clonmult. In the hills outside of Midleton lies the village of Clonmult. It is one of those blink-and-you-miss it places that is hard to find when you look for it, and passes by almost unnoticed when you drive through it. There isn’t a huge amount of things to see up there […]
Only forward
In the autumn of 2012, a 92-year-old retired engineer named Bobby Hogg passed away, and with him went a little piece of Scottish culture. Hogg was the last native speaker of a Scots dialect spoken by the fisherfolk of the isolated Cromarty community, the only other native speaker having been his brother, Gordon, who had […]
The perfect Finnish
Four years ago I interviewed a Corkman making whiskey in Finland – this originally ran in the Evening Echo in 2014, but as their whiskey is hitting the market I thought I’d dig it out. IRELAND and Finland have more in common than you’d think. Despite being on opposite sides of the European Union, we […]
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
Local mom-‘n’-pop operation Irish Distillers have released their results, sans mention of the alleged new plant they are planning. However, you can see from the figures that they are going to struggle to keep up with the demand at this rate, so it would suggest to me that they need to expand beyond Midleton. All […]
Let them drink cake
Wrote this for the Indo about getting druunkish on cake – The Kerry TD Danny Healy Rae once said that eating a big meal before driving could be a factor in causing accidents. It came as a surprise, not only to the scientific and medical community, but also to the people he was addressing at […]
An ode to Love
Wrote this feature for the Indo – It’s the greatest tournament on the planet – we’ve waited and waited for it to come round and now here it is, and it is better than we could have anticipated. We may not have a representative of our country at it, but we are all there in […]
Edinburgh 2018
The zoo, museum, and Royal Mile.
