Boris, marriage, divorce and the Catholic Church

So twice divorced Boris re-married, in no less than the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, triggering a media manufactured storm of “controversy” over the legality, propriety and morality of the Catholic church allowing such a twice divorced man to re-marry in their principal English cathedral.   In fact, the rules of the church, in allowing such marriages  were...

Pandemic Travel

To London.  First time for some eighteen months.    A little surreal.    Dublin airport virtually deserted with odd strangers wondering about in masks.   The queue for security scanning, usually a long tedious stretch, were moving fast, social distancing in place.  Just one of the great bank of scanners was in operation.    To be honest it was...

Cranky old Man

This poem appeared on my facebook feed from my Austrailian friend Paul Halloran. It was so good that it demands to be shared. When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in an Australian country town, it was believed that he had nothing left of any value. Later, when the...

Padraig and Matilda

I am so pleased that Australia has been placed on the UK green list and is therefore, once again, open to visit.   I say once again, but if fact I have never been there.  Always wanted to go and it might even be said I was a little obsessed by the place.  My favourite TV...

The Road to the Rising – The Big Personalities – Sir Roger Casement

Broadsides - A collection of bits and pieces

The Road to the Rising was an RTE History Festival held on O’Connell Street in Dublin on Easter Monday the 6th April.  Over 50,000 people attended, dipping into and out of exhibits, street theatre, lectures, music, re-enactments and the screening of historical films.  The Big Personalities series of lectures were limited to 20 minutes for each of the speakers.  this is the talk on Roger Casement.

It is 1915. Sir Roger is in Germany, as a guest of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Imperial German Government. He is engaged in a secret and dangerous mission on behalf of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. 1915 will not be his finest year but it is a year of great personal danger and risk.

He is not happy in Germany. He is isolated from the planning of the rebellion. He has no direct contact with Ireland and can only write and cable Dublin via America…

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The Last Remembrance

Powerful Stuff from Peter's Pondering. Chris decided long ago that he could no longer endure the Ceremony of Remembrance parades and services.  It was too much for him.  He knew that he would break down and weep copious tears, sobbing at all of the memories that he could not set aside.  He could never forget! Instead, each year,...

Ave Verum Corpus

Loved this from allenriz Just had to reblog it. Ave Verum Corpus has often been described as one of the few perfect pieces of music ever written. It is a mere three minutes long and simple in musical structure but ranks among Mozart’s best works. Ave Verum Corpus (Hail, True Body), (K. 618), is a...

To review or not to review, that is the question.

I had occasion recently to purchase a toilet chain. Amazon describes it more correctly as a “Victorian traditional ceramic & chrome flush pull for high-level cistern.” It arrived quickly and efficiently, I was well pleased and it was easy to install. Amazon then emailed me and asked me to rate the chain and to write...

The Thrid Edition of the Book of Kells

Brother Julian was not an historian, he was not too sure, for example, of the date upon which the second edition of the Book of Kells had been authorised or published.  He thought it might have been some time during the 25th century when there had been that quantum breakthrough in software developments.   In fact,...

The Shiny Suit

I bought a shiny suit.  It was sort of blue grey and shimmered as it caught the light.  The knife edge creases down the drainpipe trouser legs accentuated the shimmer.  It was gross, terrible, beyond bad taste. It was tonly the second suit I ever bought.   The first was when I had just turned 17. ...

The Last dinner

Gavan was dying.  We knew it, Patricia and I, and James, his brother, all three of us knew it.   He was struggling with life itself.  But Gavan, he wouldn’t accept it.  He remained confident that the experimental drugs would work, that he would recover, that he would return to college, see his friends, that this...

Homage to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Two poems from my current collection, a homage to D.H. Lawrence, which by the way, have been rejected by my publishers. Poem 1: We must go now, out in’t  ter  pouring rain Bollock naked in the wooded glade Except fer our wellies And I will hold you wet me dear And whisper into yer dampish...

How did we manage without sex education.

We didn’t know how to kiss.  No one told us how.  No one showed us what to do.  There was very little on the TV  and the kind of films we went to see on Saturday mornings didn’t have any kissing in them.  Abbott and Costello:  no kissing, Tarzan: no kissng, Dean Martin and Jerry...

School Dancing

I was taught to dance at my secondary School.  In the gymnasium.   It was during P.T. sessions, when it was too wet or too cold outside to go across to the fields. The girls would form up on one side of the gym and the boys on the other.   We would be taught how to...

A Detective story:Working at Woolies on Lister Gate

There was this huge Woolworths store on Lister gate in Nottingham, two floors, maybe three if I remember right, although the top floor was for staff. I worked there one summer, back in the seventies.  I was a student, up a Ruskin college in Oxford.   The grants were pretty decent then but I still needed...

Four Prosecution Lawyers

Four lawyers from the Roger Casement prosecution team.   In 1916 Sir Roger Casement, for his role in the Easter Rising, was prosecuted for High Treason and was found guilty and sentenced to death.   This portrait of the four lawyers is taken from the great canvas by Sir John Lavery depicting the appeal hearing of Casement...

My Nightmare Dinner Party

  I never wanted to go to this dinner party.   The thought of it appalled me. I had much more important things to do.   I could have watched telly.   I could have washed my hair.  I could have got drunk.   I really really did not want to go. But it was my fate, my punishment,...

Surviving the Lockdown(4)

So last week we broke out of lockdown, headed out in glorious summer weather driving west towards the Shannon, top-down on the car, Leonard Cohen on the radio, next to no traffic on the roads and Ireland bathed in sunlight and looking as glamorous as it could possibly be. But there is a great sadness...

Roger Casement.

This is my first attempt at making a YouTube video.   It is on a subject I know well and ofter lecture upon, but embarking on the making of a video was quite a challenge.   First I had to master Powerpoint.   I would be pretending if I was to say that I have done that. Then...

Surviving the lockdown (2)

It can get lonely during the lockdown. I was discussing this very subject with a spider that found its way into the bath. “Why,” I asked him, or possibly her – you just can’t tell, “why, of all the bathrooms in all the world have you chosen this one?” It wouldn’t answer. Just kind of...