Impressions of poverty – A Dublin Story

If you’ve ever listened to the song Running to Stand Still from U2’s Joshua Tree album you will have heard about the Dublin neighbourhood of Ballymun in the lyric, “I see seven towers but I only see one way out.” Located on the northern periphery of Dublin city, Ballymun was at one time Ireland’s largest and…

I am an Emperor

Simon & Garfunkel sang in The Sound of Silence that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” I don’t know much about all that, but I happened upon this poem chalked onto the boarded up window of a condemned building on Camden High Street this afternoon. The grammar certainly leaves a…

A Death in Morocco

Abraham’s son had drowned in a nearby river that morning. The boy, we would be later told, was 7 years old. The body washed to shore about a mile downstream from where he had been last seen playing with friends. A sharp undercurrent had caught him and he was unable to swim. None of the…

The Charming Irrelevance of Russell Brand

Last night, I watched uncomfortably as Russell Brand ranted at Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight. Coming across more as a disaffected first-year-undergraduate-soc-and-pol-student than any sort of credible political commentator, Brand demonstrated not only an unsettling propensity towards demagoguery, but to be the most frustrating kind of citizen. That is, one that doesn’t vote. In fact,…

George and Syria

An exercise I’ve been recently conducting involves typing “what would George Orwell have to say about…” followed by any random topic into Google. People, it seems, cannot resist attributing opinions on topics such as the Iraq war, ipods, contact lenses and diet cola to a man who has been dead for well over sixty years….

Christrionics

Finding my way through the begrimed passages that connect the ventricular routes of the London Tube service beneath Piccadilly Circus Station the other day, I happened upon a poster advertising an upcoming open-air reenactment of the trial, torture and death of Christianity’s  top rockstar superhero, Jesus H. Christ. The Passion of Jesus, a modern imagining…

Vege-might

Leopold Bloom may have eaten with relish the “inner organs of beasts and fowl” but I fear my own meat eating days could be swiftly drawing to an end. The decision to quit meat has been in the pipeline for several years. Whilst grudgingly employed as a chef, I maintained that the moment I was able…

Misprints, Miscommunications and Lies

In his highly entertaining inspection of the many uses and abuses of the English language, The King’s English, Kingsley Amis addresses the struggle between “illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms” [1] by identifying two distinct sorts of offender of whose linguistic habits one is impelled to “deplore if not abhor.” Amis classifies members of…