Lines Written in Dejection

 My eye was caught yesterday by one of those little non-news stories that resonate, for all their silliness.   A young woman, a student at a British university, with hopes of making a career in broadcasting, bid in a charity auction for the opportunity to work for a week as intern to veteran broadcaster Vanessa…

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Clean Up Week

First an apology to those readers who asked, longer ago than I care to think, for the chocolate chilli recipe. I can only plead slipshod housekeeping. A purring, well-oiled website is all too easy to ignore. Until someone points out that you have 630 unanswered messages in your mailbox, and not all of them offering you cheap pharmaceuticals. So…

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Up With the Lark

  Actually, up about four hours ahead of any larks in Dublin 6. I was drinking my first cup of tea at 5am this morning. Well, my alarm clock, set for 5.30, was sitting like sweating gelignite on my night table and I thought what the hell, catch it unawares, turn the damned thing off…

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What would Sam Say?

A couple of scrapings from the bottom of this week’s chunder bucket. First the news that Dr Alan Gribben, an American academic, is about to publish a de-niggered version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The word ‘slave’ has been substituted. His argument, and it is quite a fair one, is that children no longer read the…

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Out of Step

    We saw off the last of the mince pies this afternoon and tomorrow the tree gets stripped ready for Mr Rent-a-Tree to take it back to the forest. All done bar paying the VISA bill, you might say. But actually, we still haven’t had Christmas. This year we are in the strange position of belonging…

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