If you've had the right kind of education, it's amazing how many things you can find to feel guilty about.
That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?
If life is a book, then read it while you can.
Never pass a bar with your name on it
We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.
It's always stimulating to visit new places, acquire fresh knowledge and expand your portfolio of nightmares.
I reckon if I can't spend the day sleeping, the next best thing is to spend it reading and drinking.
I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it's generally much easier to get a drink.
The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist’s pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter.
But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness:...
Mind you, he looks a bit out of it, gazing around in confusion, as if his sax player’s brain has been removed and replaced with a drummer’s.
I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who’d learned his craft as a teenager from his...
I find my grandfather, buried with Great-Aunt Hannah and Uncle Jack. His surname is spelled ‘MacCarthy’, with an extra ‘a’; like many names here, it’s a translation from the Irish, so the ‘a’ is optio...
Wherever you go in the world, there will be people to tell you it'll be bigger, stranger, better, more authentic if you take the time to go somewhere else instead; but if you are there, you won't be h...
The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist’s pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter. St Patrick’s Day, and McCarthy’s...
I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger.