“There is no teaching, but only recollection” – Socrates Last year I saw a stand-up comedian who, after riffing for 10 minutes on his recent travels across the United States, concluded his set (which was admittedly quite low on laughs) by idiomatically declaring to the half-cut Friday night audience that “when you experience different cultures,…
Category: Travel
Une Generation Perdue
The house on Gunnersbury Park was the first place I lived in London and it was one of the filthiest and most unfortunate grub holes in the whole city. For a start, it was much too small for purpose. There were over 25 bodies under that roof and we only had 8 rooms between us – and that’s not…
Don’t Grow Up
For the past few weeks, the weather in London has been – what the Irish would describe as – “desperate.” Making my way to the work, a few soggy mornings ago, I caught glance of this shop front and despite the soaked and depressing concrete grays of the city at this time of year, it…
Harry Potter, Famous Dads and Stoke Newington
After two-and-just-under-a-quarter years, I have finally bid farewell to my pokey box room flat in Acton, West London, and moved into an altogether different pokey box room in the bohemian neighbourhood of Stoke Newington, North East London. The move coincides with my recent finishing of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (a book that has single…
A stroll through London Bridge
The other day, I was due to view a new flat in Stoke Newington and had literally traveled across the city when I received an email from the advertiser informing me that the room had just been filled. Upset but never disheartened, I decided to make the best of the day and explore a part of…
Back in London
I returned to London after spending my Christmas in Bristol. Walking to Westminster Station, I took this quick picture of the Abbey with my phone. Such an incredible building. Follow my blog with Bloglovin
Insert End of an Era Cliché Here
I was in White City earlier this week and took a stroll by the building previously known as BBC Television Centre. With the vacant office lights off and the complex’s main entrance barricaded shut, I was put in mind of the occasion I visited the disused ship manufacturing district in Belfast City (referred to by…
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…
Looking back on Galway
In the initial months of the Irish economic collapse, I lived like a down-and-out amongst the bohemians of Galway City. My hair was long, my clothes were scruffy and I had no greater aspirations in life above funding my next meal. As if things couldn’t get any worse, I joined a writing group. While, as a collective, the group…
Traveling better with Tubiquette
Even at the best of times, riding the Tube can be a labored and infuriating experience. And it’s not even the delays, cramped carriages or bronchiole clogging tunnels that’ll drive an otherwise sane person to screaming at non-English-speaking strangers, but more a confluence of small, regularly occurring, irritations; tourists standing on the left side of…
The Many Disappointments of Camden Town
I recently happened upon The Sunday Telegraph’s former travel editor and columnist, Nigel Buxton’s blog. In one particularly sharp entry, Buxton recalls the 1959 memorandum he delivered to the newspaper’s Fleet Street offices, outlining his literary manifesto. The letter begins with a quote from Alexander Kinglake’s classic, Eothen, which I would like to share it…
The Hard Brass Backbone of Bristol
It is perhaps quite fitting that the ugliest part of Bristol’s city centre is its high-street Shopping Quarter. I cannot recall ever being in a district so under-representative of its host city as Bristol’s shopping quarter. Combining faceless high-street retail brands and desperately ugly, mid-20th century architecture , the shopping quarter is a ghetto of charmless consumerism to…
Downtown Chicago in the Early Hours
Eager to shake the desynchronosistic hangover acquired by a transatlantic British Airways flight and having exhausted the hotel’s understandably sparse early-morning entertainment opportunities, I figured that a hike through the downtown Chicago area would perhaps prove the remedy I was looking for. For a major US metropolis, Chicago sure is quiet at 6am. In addition…
Hard Rockin’ In Chicago
In the summer of 2011, I spent several weeks traveling around America’s Midwest region. Following an unpleasant 10 hour flight from Dublin to O’Hare Airport, my traveling companion informed me that my first taste of the North American hospitality industry would be via a stay at Chicago’s Hard Rock Hotel. I was of two minds…
The Everyday Amusements of London Life
The frenetic pace of London life can often lead one to overlook the bizarre quirks that make this city such an entertaining place in which to live. Employ a keen eye and you don’t have to walk far before encountering some amusement or other. Sometimes juvenile, sometimes ironic, always interesting, here are a few of…