Snacks Bygraves

A pleasant cup of tea? Then I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates. For a blog with the preoccupations this one has, how pleasant to find that a quaint tea room has opened in the quiet surroundings of Deansgrange Cemetery in South Dublin. In a place I like to visit often, this is a very […]

Marr, Morrissey and the notion that comebacks don’t work

Last week, as I write, this blog and its beloved went to see Johnny Marr play at that lugubrious Dublin venue, The Academy. For anyone in their 40s who had seen The Smiths in their heyday (i.e. any point in their brief career), it was an extraordinary experience. Johnny Marr has finally settled back into […]

Depression – don’t just pretend to be aware, become properly Aware.

On World Mental Health Day, it’s worth noting, again, just how alone people with depression are and feel. Not everyone seems to realise this, and there is still an astonishing amount of ignorance and denial, despite a great number of awareness campaigns on depression. Aware do incredible work in this field with their “I Am […]

Pointing the way to a Happy New Year

Dearie me, it’s 2012. The world is in the grip of death, famine, financial collapse, and, despite the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, there are still a significant number of lunatics running the global asylum. The New Year arrives with violent storms battering the coasts of Britain and Ireland. Even David Bowie is about to turn 65. […]

These are Grave times…

It is that time of year. The air has turned chill and crisp, the leaves brown, orange and scarlet. The time of overcoats, scarves, gloves and mystery, when I feel the overwhelming impulse to listen to the very bleakest Scott Walker and read ghost stories. It’s also the time when I feel like spend chilly afternoons wandering around cemeteries. […]

Tony Curtis 1925-2010

Very sad to hear of the death of one of my childhood heroes, Tony Curtis, at the age of 85. A handsome, rugged and stylish man, he was a surprisingly versatile actor in his younger days. He received an Oscar nomination for his performance as John ‘Joker’ Jackson in 1959’s The Defiant Ones, starring alongside Sidney […]

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 […]

Oui, je bored… think I’ll just commune with the dead

Whenever my friend and I were bored during the long, winter nights of the early 1980s – when we were restless teenagers, fed up listening to Tears For Fears and there was only Bergerac on the telly – our thoughts inevitably turned to talking to dead people. Out would come the little table, the Scrabble […]

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins 1949 – 2010

R.I.P. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. No matter what happens in world snooker, we will never see your like again. There will be many tributes paid to the most entertaining player snooker has ever known and most of them will speak of a great, if wayward, man who tore up the rule book, transgressed the written laws, […]

No more excuses, guns are not sport

Another gun massacre in the UK. Hungerford, Dunblane, now Cumbria. The gun lobbyists will argue that’s not a bad figure, and figures certainly back up claims that gun crime in the UK is rare. But this is entirely missing the point. There shouldn’t be any. Michael Ryan, who killed 16 people in Hungerford in 1987, Thomas Hamilton, […]