"Unprovided with original learning, uninformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a blog”
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... Continue Reading →
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,... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
It is just perfect, perfectly appropriate, that this important 12th-century reliquary, an Irish Crucifixion plaque, should have been found, in of all places, an Irish potato field. But so it was. And according to the notes of the archaeologist who found it, it was in the year 1844. I check my notes. Yes, 1844. Just... Continue Reading →
Gorgeous spring morning. Decided to take a late breakfast in the garden. Nothing special just a cup of tea, croissant, and a glass of orange juice. Relaxing, reading the morning paper on my tablet, musing on life under lockdown. It lasted but a half hour before I was driven inside by the incessant unremitting cacophony... Continue Reading →
Portraits of important women are rare enough. Of important Irish women, even rarer. The halls, institutions, academies, universities, Inns of court, seminary’s and art galleries are well stocked with fine portraits of great and good men, and occasionally not so great and good men, they adorn board rooms, and offices, libraries, dining rooms and parliamentary... Continue Reading →
Ireland the restaurants were allowed to reopen earlier this week and last night, for the first time in months and months, I think the last time was in November, I dined out at a proper real restaurant. I had quite forgotten the delights and pleasures of dining out, of being attended by pleasant waiting staff,... Continue Reading →
There are few unions as powerful and effective as the National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport workers, or the RMT as it is more popularly known. And there are few unions as radical as they are in the political world of the Labour Movement. It’s officers and its executive are all rank and file... Continue Reading →
An Easter Poem Easter Bunnies with their chocolate ears No resurrection will assuage their fears Before this Easter day is past Some Christian sod Will scoff their ears and bite their arse
Across from the Union office, on Nottingham’s Sherwood Rise, was this nursing home for the elderly. Privately owned it employed some twenty or so care staff in a very large old Victorian rather splendid house with extensive gardens. The care staff were, as is nearly always the case, underpaid and called upon to work excessive... Continue Reading →
Every year, for the god knows how many years now, we take a house, for the whole of August, in Edinburgh, for the Festivals. In recent years it has been a gorgeous eighteenth-century property on the ancient and cobbled George Square, complete with chandeliers and a vaulted basement dining room and loads of bedrooms for... Continue Reading →
This is the view from the balcony of my Dublin apartment at Steven’s Gate, James’s Street, Dublin 8. It’s a stunning industrial landscape, millions of pints of Guinness in thousands upon thousands of barrels, stacked all the way down to the quays and the river Liffey in an impressive view from the ridge that is... Continue Reading →
There is an element of despair in remaining a member of the Labour Party. The leadership campaign is utter vanilla, entirely without life. The Tories always have more exciting and contested leadership battles, that’s a given, but this is tediously vanilla. I have been a party member for donkey’s years. Always on the left. I... Continue Reading →
Several years ago I penned a piece about traffic warden John Hancock, a man who i thought to be, and still do, a proper Nottingham character, someone who contributed a unique slice of spice to our somewhat dullish lives. He was not well pleased with the piece, not angry, but not well pleased. There were... Continue Reading →
We dined, Patricia and I, at the First Coast restaurant on the Dalry Road in Edinburgh. ( prononced Dalrye) So good was the food and the experience that I was moved to write a poem in praise of such a feast of meats. Apoligies to Rabbi Burns. A Poem with an asterisk* Cone all ye... Continue Reading →
The fascists are coming. New fascists, authoritarian, intolerant, ruthless. They will not be wearing brown shirts, nor, for Ireland, blue shirts*. They will be clad in shirts of hemp, or perhaps suits of hemp; possibly green hemp, or maybe blue; not jackboots but comfortable footwear, eco-friendly, non-leather, organic. They will be of the state, by... Continue Reading →
I must have walked past the war memorial on platform one of Paddington station a hundred times or more. It’s a very fine large bronze of a WWI soldier, designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger. He is well wrapped up against the cold and rain, wearing his steel helmet and looking down, reading a letter from... Continue Reading →
This is Field Marshall Edwin Bramall, KG, GCB, OBE, MC, JP, DL, a proper soldier’s soldier. Long before I became a member of the Labour Party, I too was a soldier. I served with Bramall in Borneo, which was a hot war, and in the cold war that was Europe. I never met another soldier,... Continue Reading →
