New Year, new list of ill-conceived, unachievable goals – or not

Every Sunday, I sit on my favourite armchair for approximately seven minutes (an unscientific average) and feel truly excited and inspired by the possibilities within my grasp. There’s a reason why this happens. I have flicked through my favourite sections of the Sunday papers for those seven minutes, made a mental reminder to return to […]

Medium rare

I’m not one for giving free advertising to any old spooky crank but I feel it’s my duty to give this chap a little exposure. Meet John, who’s evidently the Austin Powers of the parapsychological world; he’s not just a psychic medium and clairvoyant, he’s an international psychic medium and clairvoyant. Just cross his palm with plastic […]

Skirting around the real education issues in Dublin 4

With schools returning from their summer recess, the focus shifts to our children’s education once again. At this time of year, difficult choices lie ahead of them; as always, one wonders just how well-equipped they are to cope and whether potentially life-changing decisions, which have to be taken at such a tender age, will stand […]

The first sign of madness

I talked to myself a lot as child. I would act out TV dramas on my own, playing all the parts, goodies and baddies (but obviously romantic entanglements were out because I couldn’t play women, and there was no such thing as ‘gay’ when I was growing up), always timed to last as long as […]

Waiter, there’s a woman in my soup

It’s hard to believe that the boom-time obsession with spas hasn’t gone away. Glossy mags, weekend supplements and the provincial press are still plugging these idiotic, aery-faery dens of self-gratification, a hangover from what already looks like the tackiest bygone era in history. We’re already well into the first year of a new decade, and a more […]

The effluent society

I was making my way home on Saturday night (quickly, to the strains of ‘Funky Town’ by Pseudo Echo), and, despite fully expecting the streets to be swaying with drunken idiots, and peppered with discarded snack boxes and copious pools of chunky semi-digestion that operate as sole-mines all over Temple Barf, I still found myself being absolutely repulsed by […]

Hail Mary

This blog has already warmly welcomed the Green Party’s proposal to introduce tax incentives for vegan converts but not even the most militant plant-eaters among us could have predicted it would receive the support of Mary Harney TD. While I and many others are still more than a little worried about the content of her forthcoming statement on the issue, word […]

The ladder that spawned a thousand lightbulb jokes…

Regular readers (reader, maybe) may recall the recent escapade involving my office’s purloined toilet seat, and its eventual, painstaking replacement by the baseball-capped, bluetoothed, jobsworth pain-in-the-arse who looks after such things in this industrial park. Well, here I present more photographic evidence of his utter inadequacy. The vertically-challenged amateur pedant and his careless-in-the-community sidekick were in our […]

You can’t always get what you want, but…

In 2004, I elected to take voluntary redundancy from a job which had sapped my personality, soul and energy for too long. Ultimately, while others just got on with things, I thought too long and hard about them, became too bitter, narky and spiteful. I had an imperceptible patience threshold which too many people took […]

For Whom The Annabell Tolls

Like many parents, I’m often concerned about the effect TV advertising has on my children. Now, this isn’t simply me being tightfisted and worrying about the ‘pester factor’ when trying to do a supermarket shop (“Daddy, can we have a Barbie? Can we have a water cannon? Can we have a Black & Decker chainsaw?”), […]