Christmas 2019: Going Back

Christmas 2019: Going Back

Since I started blogging in 2014 I have set aside a blog for Christmas. It’s a break from my normal fare, but isn’t Christmas a break from routine too! At least for those of us lucky enough to have a job that doesn’t involve pulling a shift over it....

An emigrants Christmas wish

To celebrate Christmas this year, I thought I’d bring you the words across the Irish sea, an emigrant’s lament, a cousin of mine from the Russianside, but one of my grandmother’s generation.  Fr Tom Doyle was one of two brothers to enter the...

Enduring “Mal de Mer”

We were based in Dunmore in the winter of 1983 for the Herring fishing but we returned home in the Reaper for Christmas, and along with all the other half-decker’s, manoeuvred inside Cheekpoint quay, where they could be moored without any concern for their safety....

Robin Red Breast, my Grandmother and Christmas

Christmas time in my Grandmothers was marked by a hunt. It was her search for addresses for friends both at home and abroad, addresses she had scribbled on scraps of paper or cut from an envelope and squirrelled away.  Some were in the glass case, others in her box of...