bahern7

Friends, To see the above festive photograph on my Google+ profile, simply click this link:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BrianAhern/posts/ZjsaFRbBCpb?pid=6231898320243337410&oid=100095589267771210840 Best, BA

He watched tour highlight videos on GolfingWorld.com all night long to take his mind off the revelation. He'd had no idea that ______ held such a resentment towards him. If anyone had asked, he’d have said they were friends. Then to learn of the grudge—murderous in its proportions—it had thrown him big time. The golf was therapeutic. He read Money Monthly magazine, too, which helped enormously. His mind was like a mountain goat leaping from intellectual crag to intellectual crag. Sauntering down Fortune Street one November day he ran into a thespian friend whom he hadn’t seen in a while. “If anything, I’d like to be busier,” the actor said. He neglected to include a trigger warning in the opening paragraph of his sixth Babbling Brook. He did not believe in such things. People of his generation had stronger stomachs, were less precious, than the notice-box narcissists of the internet age. There were rings in the puddles. There was a hole in the top. He was talking i...

                    https://plus.google.com/+BrianAhern/posts/ASV6JwY8Xmx

In the dark days of the early 1980s, Croke Park was a different kind of stadium. The sleek modern edifice people know today was but a twinkle in Paddy Buggy's eye. It pains me to say it but the place was more pigsty than Hawkeye. Candidly, it was a kip. As an Artane Boys' Band trumpeter I visited this national treasure on many a Sunday. We lads - there were no girls in the band back then - would be corralled on the Hogan Stand near the Canal End during the minor games. The ground was only starting to fill up so we always got seats. In this waiting period we were proffered sandwiches of rubber ham on damp white bread, and a bitter apple. Chatting and paying scant attention to the GAA goings-on, we waited to take the field. A smoke was out of the question, as you would definitely get caught. When our moment came to shine, we would assemble with the drum major beneath the stand and march out onto the sacred turf to lead the teams, play some county tunes, and top off the per...

                                                                          It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person heading off on holidays must be feeling happy. That’s not always the case, though. Generally, I’m a ball of worry in the lead up to an otium. You’re not supposed to say it, you must feign fun at all costs, you must say I’m going to have a blast and I don’t mind the expense. In the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to take several foreign holidays. In the main these have been the standard “week in the sun” beloved of Western wage slaves. That’s not to knock the experience. I’m grateful for what I’ve had. The problem is I have trouble leaving the house at the best of times, worrying in a mildly OCD-like manner about a variety of things. First and foremost t...

They used to say of his grandmother, as she scoured pots below stairs in the big house, that she believed in pluck, endurance and devotion to duty for duty’s sake. It was written all over her - especially on her red raw hands. He dreamt of casements opening onto the foam and a feeling he was going home. His trip was beginning to wear him out. Four weeks away interpreting the hieroglyphics on the obelisks of Luxor . She maintains to this day that there was a night in the nineties when a driverless bus passed her on the North Circular Road . People scoff and say: “You were stoned!” but she knows what she saw. She was attending a psychiatrist by the name of Golvan Schlagman. She told him of a rave she had been to once where the youths were so drugged up they ripped the heads off pigeons. Schlagman’s speech was peppered with the chilly phraseology of the polished practitioner. He was no help at all. She paid him his hundred quid and went home. While chowing down on no...

"Relax," I said. "It's not K2." "I wouldn't be that cocky if I were you," said my brother Liam. A few years ago, he and I decided to climb Carrauntoohil, and this was my constant refrain to him in the week leading up to our assault on the mountain. He'd been ringing me daily with tips and updates. Bring this kind of jacket, pack this kind of food, the weather is predicted to be such-and-such. "Relax. It's not K2," I repeated. We arrived at Cronin's Yard on a dull damp day in July. The weather did not bode well for our hopes to see the views from the summit. A bunch of other prospective climbers stood huddled in the drizzle. We were split into smaller groups, climbing parties you might say, and allocated guides. One of our guides was a fit and nimble retired guard in his early fifties. The other man to lead us to the top was a local with an in-depth knowledge of the terrain and a broad Kerry accent of the Healy-...

He was being put out to seed. The knacker’s yard loomed. He saw himself become glue to be sniffed by a homeless youth in Merchant’s Arch. It wasn’t all bad news. In a sense, he had achieved immortality. He would live on in the fleeting inebriation of an urchin. He arrived to work wearing a head-mounted display unit, a HMDU. The phrase Christianity is Art flickered before his eyes. A stranger on the bus had asked him: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” It was actually a relief to be at work. Several days earlier he had found himself in a piss-stinking tunnel in a parallel universe. It was raining rats and frogs. She was worried about the starlings in her attic. A man looked at her in the street. He had the face of an unhappy dog. A meeting was called and he found himself in a room full of cyborgs speaking in hashtags. She had vivid dreams about Thoor Ballyle...

“Definition destroys; there is nothing definite in this world.”                                                                                           Jack Frost                                                                             Hector Starkweather was his mother’s pride and joy. He was the perfect son: seventeen and a half, bright and polite, musically and academically gifted and utterly respectful of his parents. At school he performed brilliantly and his teachers considered him a pleasure to have in class. In his final year now, he was expected to complete his ex...

I remember it well. It was during a leisurely cycle to the Phoenix Park one sunny morning in 2010 that a perfectly formed "letter to the editor" arrived unbidden into my head. When I got home, I typed it up and sent it off to one of the national newspapers. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing. I checked their letters page for several days afterwards. Even though my letter remained unpublished, a dam had burst. What prompted me to take that road I still don't know, but my urge to opine became insatiable. Before I knew it, letters to the editor were hatching in my head at all hours of the day and night. Following more attempts over the next few weeks I finally had a letter published. It proved a thrill to see my viewpoint in print. My mildly contrarian missive set me on course to become 'Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells' (via Dublin). It was in the early stages, but I was well and truly bitten by the letter-writing bug. In the early stages o...

Readers (I'm optimistic), You may have heard of a new app called Meerkat. It's growing in popularity around the globe. Never one to let a bandwagon pass me by, I've been toying around on Meerkat and have posted the result to YouTube (see link below). Unfortunately, as I make clear in the video, my attempt did not exactly garner many viewers. Nonetheless, I'll persist. As I say I'm optimistic, and I actually found the whole process of speaking off-the-cuff (extemporizing if you will) to be rather fun. Humble to the tips of my toes, Brian Here's the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImHmT35LZx4 PS Next time I promise to shoot in wide angle.

                                           You gotta love writing, why else would you do it? Not for the money. With The World’s a Stage she felt like Michael Cunningham fictionalizing the life of Virginia Wolfe. It took her hours to write. You can basically watch live death on the internet these days. At the weekend she had a visit from a sofa maker called Shay Long. She marked the page she was reading “Bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust” and put the kettle on. Shay produced his brochures. Her father had been a classic Irish drinker: manic when drunk and a pain-in-the-hole depressive when sober. She wondered if there was an asylum somewhere for people who considered ____ __ _________ to be a good song? She chomped on an apple having peeled it with her old, horn-handled knife. During an afternoon nap the poetry of Arya W...

Certain work done for free is worth every unearned penny, and amateur acting falls into that category. In January last year I had an unexpected email. "Hi Brian," wrote Declan, from whom I hadn't heard in ten years. "I'm doing a play in Portmarnock in May. The director's looking for men in their forties. It's Arsenic and Old Lace. Come along to rehearsals in Malahide if you're interested." I remembered going to see Arsenic and Old Lace in the Gaiety in the mid-1980s with my English teacher. Before you get the wrong idea, I wasn't on a date with Miss O'Driscoll. A whole bunch of the class went along. So here was my chance to act in Joseph Kesselring's 1941 classic and return to treading the amateur boards after a decade-long hiatus. I drove over to Malahide and met everybody. The director, Jean Goslin, was charming and welcoming, with lots of experience putting a variety of acting troupes through their paces. I read for the part...

                                                      Todd Flesk was riding in a taxicab to the museum district of Ole Zork City. Smoking heavily, he was bearing up considering—on top of his own woes—the cabdriver’s plangent whine which filled the car with an air of great miserableness. The problem for the driver was a constant stream of cyclists whizzing to within a whisker of his bonnet before veering off from it as quickly as they’d arrived. Todd sensed the poor fellow had reached a tipping point to full mental breakdown and could relate to the man’s state quite readily. A raft of unsettling thoughts raced in and out of the Flesk brain and a sardonic smile grazed his lips at how similar it all seemed to the bicycles brushing the chrome so perilously. —“Of course it’ll all be my fault,” El Wheels keened, and he slapped his hand off the wheel in...