Ember Days and nature connection
Today, Friday and Saturday are Ember Days. I had never heard of these (though “embertide” rings a faint bell) until I came across this tweet In a way Fr Schrenk…
Tag: time passes
New Geneva, a (failed) Genevan colony in Waterford, designed by James Gandon
Recently I came across the placename Geneva Barracks, near Passage East in Waterford. Obviously a slightly unusual name, I wondered was it an Anglicisation of something – but in fact…
“I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him.”
I came across this quote by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys via The Frailest Thing blog – the concept of the “ever denser web of deadlines required by the various social spheres” reminded…
Corncrake in UCD 1982
The autum 2018 issue of Wings, the magazine of BirdWatch Ireland, has a piece on the avifauna of University College Dublin‘s Belfield campus. For those unfamiliar this is in the…
Beshoff’s Chip Shop Founder was Last Survivor of Potemkin Mutiny
From his 1987 New York Times obituary: Ivan Beshoff, the last survivor of the 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin, a harbinger of the Russian Revolution, died Sunday, his…
The amnesia of our age: the lonely passion of Brian Moore
When I became aware of “serious” literature in the late 80s/early 90s, Brian Moore was quite a substantial figure – repeatedly nominated for the Booker Prize, his books made into…
“the unbridled onward rush into the abyss”
From “Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time” by Simon Garfield: “Optimistically, the more benign form of frenetic standstill is not a new thing. In the terminology of popular…
The surprising complications of tide-watching
Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ “Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth” has a title that sounds hyperbolic, but is endearing in its combination of a certain rhetorical restraint…
Séamus Sweeney 