On the Isle of Lismore, far off the beaten track, is the shambling ruin of Castle Ceoffin. It resembles, more than anything, a gnarled, groping hand reaching skyward.
Posts
Like many working class families, we used to cut turf for our fires in the winter. A visit to an old peat bog brings back some childhood memories…
Tom and Eileen’s house. Glenshesk, 2006.
The lure of an abandoned house is in imagining the story of the people who lived there. Who they were. What their lives were like. Why they left behind their home and where they went to next. But in the case of this hillside house in Glenshesk, I knew the people well.
Hey there, reader. Let me tell you a story about a leafy, bumpy road in South Belfast that I’ve come to call home.
Rewind to two days before the funeral, his green Nissan Primera racing toward Ballycastle for the final time. But he’s not at the wheel, I’m the driver, my newly widowed mother beside me, still shell-shocked. Sister in the back seat, silent.
The boys and I have just come back from a short trip to Galway. On the second day we stopped off at Portumna, a quiet little town that Lisa and I discovered on a Shannon cruise about 9 years previously.
How does an Atheist deal with death? Two things have made me think about death and Atheism lately: a reading of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion and the news that my father has terminal cancer.
Last Wednesday I got dragged to France. I’ve never been to France, although I have tried their method of kissing before and even their ticklers once or twice.