bahern7

“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 Even though my letter remained unpublished, a dam had burst.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...

Dublin . A.D. 2003. Georgia O’Connor stepped from the shower onto a fluffy pink bath mat in her en suite. Taking a towel from a hook on the wall she began drying her beautiful, tanned 20-year-old body. Bending over, her hair fell forward—blonde, wet and tangled—until it almost touched the floor. She bunched it together tightly, squeezing hard, as a thin line of water came forth. Straightening up again, she wrapped her mane inside the towel and walked naked to her bedroom. The room was exceptionally neat to a near obsessive degree. Unlike many girls of twenty,   Georgia   took great pleasure in such tidiness. It helped her to feel in control—a feeling she loved very much. She was in fine fettle this bright May morning, tingling with excitement at the thought of her upcoming three-month stay in   Boston . The college year had just finished—this was adding to her sense of happiness—and she was due to leave for the States in a couple of days. If it turned out...