Under Pressure

The bookshelf above my bed is now beyond overloaded and I’m quite certain that it’s going to collapse any day now. We’re at breaking point. One of the screws on the bottom left corner is looking particularly dodgy, and despite my best efforts I can’t get the damn thing tightened back into the wall. I…

Elmo!

I know, I know, I haven’t written anything in weeks, but the truth of the matter is that I really haven’t had the time. I’ve just taken a promotion in my job – which means more work – and I’ve also spent a fair amount of time travelling around Europe. I have, however, had time…

The Enda Kenny Mask

I’m getting quite comfortable with Photoshop and Illustrator CS6, so I decided to get a bit satirical and political with it. Enda Kenny is an Irish Fine Gael politician, and has been the Taoiseach (Irish Prime-Minister) since March 2011. Fine Gael are a rather conservative group and are seen by many as being out-of-touch with…

Giving life the runaround

Of all the tortures to which an otherwise sane person could willingly submit themselves, there are few activities I dread and despise more than jogging. Everything about this most sadistic of ventures fills me with equal measures of distain and revulsion. And yet, as soon as I arrive home from work, I waste no time in…

Baked Beans

I just had one of my tweets featured on The Guardian’s Life & Style page, offering my own modest contribution to the otherwise rather unassuming business of cooking baked beans. Let me just say, straight off the bat, I love baked beans and I’m not alone; around 2.3 million tins of those beauties are consumed…

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…

Why Even Bother

Without trying to come across as too pompous – yet doing just that – I would like to share a section from the introduction to a “Condensation of Animal Farm” published by World Digest in January 1946 and in reference to the writings of George Orwell. It goes a little like this: (Mr Orwell) does not hesitate to criticize…