bahern7

                                                                          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...