Well the panic station weeks of April are thankfully now over and Helen is recovering well at home under my immaculate and dutiful nursing skills. The District Nurse now sees her every other day to tend the massive wound which became infected after the angiogram procedure and had to be […]
Ireland
Two Weeks Of Trauma – Part 3
Monday 18th April An early phone call from Galway ICU telling us not to come down as Helen was being bundled into an ambulance and being taken back to Sligo and to ring Sligo ICU that afternoon. I rang at 4.00pm and was told that Helen had arrived but that […]
Two Weeks Of Trauma – Part 2
Tuesday April 12th After a night of disturbed reflective sleep, I was up early at 6.00am. The management of the hotel had given us a splendid suite of rooms, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and a fully equipped kitchen. All night long I was pondering on the resuscitation […]
Two Weeks Of Trauma – Part 1
On the Sunday afternoon of 10th April my wife of 43 years and one month took a funny turn. Sitting in an armchair reading her kindle, she started struggling to breath, she could not speak but after a couple of minutes things returned to normal. She had not been too […]
Three Score And Ten And Still Living.
There comes a time in a man’s life when he suggests to himself that “I’ll have one last lash”. It has been a while in coming, slowly and recently I have begun to have a distaste for a session down the pub, a bellyful of booze. Pints of Guinness now […]
Holy Ghostly Tales
Living where I do, on the banks of the Boyle River where even on a bad day you see more wildlife than cars, more rats than people, more rain than sunshine, our major task is the gathering of correct information. As by choice we do not have a television or […]
Gallipoli Galloped
Last week I had the doubtful pleasure of taking 20 people to Gallipoli for an eight day tour of the battlefields and a chance to follow in the footsteps of the 5th Battalion Connaught Rangers. I say doubtful because of the awful behaviour of three members of the party which […]
A Victory For Right Over Wrong.
I think it was in 2011 when the now discredited Fine Gael/Labour coalition government of Ireland in trying to raise some much needed capital decided to levy a Household Charge of €100 on all properties in Ireland. They decided to let the villainous bankers, developers and politicians get off scot […]
All We Can Give The Dead Is Memory
On 22nd February 2015 my wife and I flew out of Dublin Airport bound for Beauvais 50 miles north of Paris, an airport in much need of investment and used by lots of budget carriers from North Africa and especially by our very own Ryan Air. A hundred years ago […]
Hunger Striking To History
Well yesterday Dublin witnessed what could only be classed as a spontaneous reaction to the ridiculous judge Paul Gilmartin’s sentencing of the Dublin Five to prison for coming within 20 metres of a water meter installer. 10,000 or so locals from the Dublin area arose, put on their boots and […]