Winter of Discount Tent

Greetings. And I mean “greeting” very much in the Scots’ sense of the word*. I Have Grave News has had a wee holiday, so when better to come back than on the most depressing day of the year? And it’s been such a lovely few weeks, too. What have we missed? Well, the first thing […]

Super Trouper, Pooper-Scooper

Ah, Hogmanay. ‘Tis the season for anyone with a dodgy beard and/or a crappy ’70s hairstyle to pretend they’re in Abba. And that, as they say, is just the girls. Yes, it’s the time of year when hundreds of clearly inebriated people pay good (a.k.a. scarce) money to sit in the function room of a soulless country […]

How Green Was My Hobby?

According to the “special” Christmas Day edition of The Avondhu, the Green Party’s greenest candidate for the 2009 local elections, Fermoy’s Adam Douglas, is “concerned over fishing proposals”. No wonder. It’s almost guaranteed that fishing was his dad’s proposal; like most kids, young master Douglas no doubt wanted to go to Funderland instead.

For Whom The Bells Jingle…

Friday, December 19th: At length, I took shelter from the howling wind and relentless rain under a dark canopy on Leeson Street. It was a particularly dismal spot on this torrid night; a place where nocturnal revellers would smoke cigarettes, gossip and guffaw, and grimace at the cowering vagrants who nestled amongst the wheelie bins, […]

You Have Kilt Me…

Well, if this doesn’t put the Ross back in your Cromarty, you’re already immune. It appears my old country wants its ex-pats back. Well, if Connery fancies paying taxes there again, and Lulu is prepared to go on a hunt for her long-jettisoned accent, maybe I will go back. For a weekend. The song carries […]

What’s blue and upsets older people?

That’ll be the “festive” December/January edition of Senior Times, which comes with the reassuringly seasonal front-page headline “Road To Nowhere”. Pass the humbugs, why don’t you?

Peppa’s Revenge

The full horror only began to dawn on hungover shoppers on Sunday morning. Men dragged out of their beds by their wives for Christmas shopping, lured by the promise of “a fry” when they got to Dundrum, saw the annihilation of breakfast taking place in front of their eyes, splashed across their Sunday Worlds. Pig was off […]

U Beauties!

The ever-wonderful U Magazine just got even more wonderful. Last night, it won the PPA Consumer Magazine of the Year 2008 award. Congratulations to all the lassies in the office, especially my ed Jennifer Stevens, and deputy eds Shauna O’Halloran and Martha Connolly (and of course my long-time colleague Nathalie Marquez Courtney who is now […]

I Always Wanted To Go Into Space, Man…

…and seeing this picture just reminded me. Taken in September 2007 from the International Space Station, which was over the coast of eastern Honduras at the time, it shows the truly awesome size and force of Hurricane Felix from the relative tranquility of space. Terrifying and beautiful all at once. We humans, for all our proven destructive potential, […]

Oh, Aye, Almost Forgot…

Happy St Andrew’s Day. As if anyone else is celebrating…