Published: Irish Times, 20 August 2011

The Trawlerman

IT’S 3.45AM AND not a soul is stirring in Kinsale. As our jeep crunches to a halt on the roadside, the headlights reveal a lone heron wading in the tide below. Shane Murphy bounds down the gangway and boards Aurora Borealis, a 35ft inshore trawler he has skippered for six years.

He flicks a light switch in the wheelhouse and fires up the diesel engine. Mike McCarthy, his crewman, busies himself with the moorings. Our passage out of Kinsale this morning will be with the help of a baffling array of technologies: Decca plotter, echo sounder, radar, Sodena plotter, autopilot, GPS and compass.

“I might also look out of the window occasionally,” adds the skipper, deadpan. Read the rest of this entry »

This is funny

I spent three hours at my wife’s grave today. Read the rest of this entry »

Finito

This is a piece I wrote about The Devil’s Double for The Guardian last weekend. I’m flattered someone took the time to set up, not one, but two comment accounts to defend Latif Yahia and his Walter Mitty-esque memoirs. But most of all, I’m glad that this is the last time I’ll be mentioning his name, here or anywhere else.

“Readers will have to live without his thoughts on the the retirement of Micheal O’Muircheartaigh and the suspicious longevity of Fungi the Dolphin…”

It is a bright, clear morning in mid-September. Aidan Gillen’s battered BMW rattles along one of the bumpy backroads that snake across the sun-kissed Dingle peninsula. To our right stands Mount Brandon. Ahead, the Atlantic Ocean sparkles in a summer’s last hurrah. But the driver is ill-at-ease. I’m a journalist. He doesn’t like journalists. You can tell. Read the rest of this interview here.

“He went out drunk and hit the ball like he was beating the hell off someone. He was a superhero.”

PUGWASH
Songwriter Thomas Walsh talks Twitter, Brian Wilson and crisp addiction.

You’re looking well, Thomas.
Thank you. Lost five stone in the last year. I was twenty-five stone, I’m now twenty. Ideally, I’d like to be fifteen. I had a bit of a shock to be honest. I was told if it happened again, I’d be gone before I was fifty. So I haven’t eaten crisps in a year. Seriously, there should be rehab for crisp eaters.

What are the secrets of your bikini body?
My tip would be not eating a big plate of taco fries and falling asleep in the chair. If you do that most nights of the week, with a bellyful of drink and a kebab, that’s not going to be good for you. It’s not a myth. Read the rest of this entry »