The Thirsty Gargoyle

Days accumulate meanings as we age. Today would have been my mam’s birthday, were she still with us here, and so with me thinking of her any...

The river Boyne is tidal outside our house, rising and falling as it ebbs and flows with the salty waters of the Irish Sea. The water can dr...

I'm not sure there's anywhere in the world that annoys me more than Ireland, but England surely runs it a close second. One of the s...

I’ve used the ‘take a break’ function on Facebook for the first time today, not even knowing about it before this morning, reducing what I c...

Ten years ago today, in a London week that saw friends married, a clerical funeral, an emergency noctural visit to hospital, a shamefully la...

There’s a passage in The Moviegoer where Walker Percy has the narrator muse on what he calls ‘certification’. ‘Nowadays when a person lives ...

Flicking through Herodotus over breakfast, as you do, it occurs to me again that it’s interesting how the first historian implicitly but cle...

 It’s strange to think it’s 27 years today since Krzysztof Kiéslowski died, leaving behind a marvellous, tender, profoundly humanising but a...

I’ve been wrestling recently with questions of means and ends, and whether desirable ends ever justify dodgy means. Discussions around this ...

 Today is the feast of All Souls, or The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, as my missal has it. It's a special day in the Chur...