Category: Thoughts

  • The blankets

    When I was pondering what I would write about last week I was thinking about blankets. At the time I was walking with heavy steps along my street, fighting against a horrible sense of fatigue. Quite often, when I try to explain fatigue I talk about having a wet woollen blanket dropped over my head,…

  • Let them be more

    Than you’ve decided they are.

  • When the rhythm of your life changes,

    Sing a different song.

  • Swans and icebergs

    Do you ever realise when you walk past other people, or sit near them on the bus, that they are all hiding something?

  • The best is yet to come

    How do you feel when you think about next week, next month or next year? Apprehensive? Despairing? Resigned?

  • Living without applause

    I caught some of the proms the other night. There was a glaring absence however. The diminished orchestra was there. The animated conductor was there. But the audience was not.

  • Finding The Lost Things

    It’s possibly a self-fulfilling prophesy, but my latest book The Lost Things is threatening to disappear into oblivion. Call it my inept marketing or people’s suspicion of that condemning word ‘subscription’, but this book is flapping round like a dying fish in the bottom of a boat right now. When I write and publish a…

  • Uncharted territory

    I’ve said this before, but I don’t like going on a journey just for the sake of it. The only mystery tour I’d tolerate is like the one my granny went on years ago which was called ‘the mystery tour to Armagh’.

  • Good surprises

    As a self-declared catastrophist, I am always taken aback when good things happen. There’s a steep hill below my parents’ holiday house in Donegal, my nemesis now, that holds something I’d never heard about in all my forty years. My dad has been seeking out an easy way down for me and others. Turns out…

  • Looking for the opposite.

    Thinking over my numerous blog posts, I’ve discovered the one leading philosophy that runs through most: acknowledging the difficulties we’re experiencing at the present time and looking for the opposite to get us through to the other side.