So This Is Christmas

Wrote a spoof story, ‘So This Is Christmas’, for the 20th December edition of the ‘Andersonstown News’, though it appears in the paper under the title ‘Time To Call A Christmas Truce’.   “That’ll be ninety pence, sir.” I went through the shrapnel in my coat and fired...

A Tale of Two Skippers

I wrote a feature for the Andersonstown News, 13th December, titled ‘A Tale of Two Skippers’, though it appears as ‘Friends Were Fiddling While The North Burned’. One does not have control over these decisions! Anyway, here it is: I stood in front of the gates to his...

The Drinker

Finished ‘The Drinker’ by Hans Fallada, a first-person narrative and semi-autobiographical portrait of an alcoholic who ends up in asylum with his life (a bit like Germany itself) in bits. The obsessiveness of the main character, Erwin Sommer, somehow reminded me of...

One-Way Traffic

The story was on page nine of my newspaper. It wasn’t a huge story yet the headline which contained the words ‘prisoner transfer’ viscerally threw up a lot of emotion and anger about the way things had been and need not have been. The headline was based on a crass...

Not Wanted

Wrote a feature for today’s edition of the ‘Andersonstown News’, which they titled: “From Most Wanted to Not Wanted in three decades”: A long, long time ago, when I was a teenager and hadn’t a clue about life, I applied for a job as a librarian. What a wonderful...