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 […]
Category: Irish Independent Column
My weekly column for the Irish Independent.
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, […]
Edinburgh, festival, Dublin, ruin
Indo col 69 The Scottish art historian Murdo Macdonald describes Edinburgh as a city that forces you to think about what a city should be. It is an extraordinary place – on one side sits Edinburgh’s Old Town, the Athens of the north, which looks like it was picked up by a vengeful god and […]
Success, failure, management, me
Indo col 68 – Malcolm Gladwell understands success. Growing up with a mother who was a psychotherapist and a father who was a professor, Gladwell wanted to become an academic, but soon realised he lacked the discipline. So he decided to be the least disciplined creature of all – a writer. Aged 20 he took […]
Boyhood, parenthood, bishophood, euthanasia
Indo col 67 – The American film director Richard Linklater seems to like making films that take place in a single day. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight all spanned a single 24 hours, and told various tales from the suburbs about the existential crises of the American middle class. […]
Ballycotton, erosion, Flynn, broadband
Can you believe that our little fishing village @BallycottonIRE is listed as one of ‘Europe’s Secret Villages’ by @NatGeo https://t.co/WAYHc1UoW3 — Ballycotton (@BallycottonIRE) July 31, 2018 Indo col 66 – In 1875, a Cork antiquarian named Philip T. Gardiner donated a cross to the British Museum. The item, found in a bog near Ballycotton in […]
Colbert, O’Reilly, immigrants, borders
Indo col 65 – Long before he was the host of one of the biggest chat shows on American TV, Stephen Colbert was a thorn in the side of the American right. Having fleshed out his fire-and-brimstone TV pundit persona (whose full title was The Rev. Sir Dr. Stephen T. Mos Def Colbert) on Jon […]
Zorin, Scorpio, Musk, McGregor
https://twitter.com/rosney/status/1019513835366109186 Indo col 64 So you’ve decided to create a supervillain. Every good story needs one – they make the good guys look great, and reassure us that there are such things as moral absolutes. First you will need a complex childhood, with an early parental divorce, a fragmented relationship with a father, and a […]
Vodka, scotch, Boris, Brexit
Indo col 63 Fellow gentlemen drinkers – do you yearn for a more manly drink? Do you lament the erosion of the bar/lounge divide, or women being allowed to drink pints? Are you confused by the modern bar scene, with its unisex toilets, non-binary mixologists and alluring flamboyance of cocktail culture? Well, good news from […]
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