Launching the Ship As a new year dawns, certain memories tend to come into our heads. This week, I was thinking about a birthday party we had for our son when he was about 6 or 7. We went to the Titanic Quarter with his classmates and boarded a tram tour led by the then […]
Some Festive Recommendations As this will be the last blog until 2025 I thought I might share some festive recommendations in the book and podcast departments. The list below are some books and podcasts I have found interesting and helpful over the past 12 months. They cover a variety of genres, as it’s good to […]
Bots and Apps and Technological Progress One of the startling things for old guys like me is how rapidly technology seems to advance and progress. I remember handwriting all my assignments in university, and I don’t think I typed up anything until my final dissertation. As I didn’t have a typewriter, I think I took […]
Making Connections I recently spent an hour and a half on a messenger chat with an engineer from BT who was trying to fix our BT vision box. All the TV channels had disappeared and we could no longer watch live TV. He kept getting me to try various leads and resets to see if […]
Mind Matters One of our son’s passions in life is climbing and, so, I found myself accompanying him recently to a big competition in Leeds. It pitted the best climbers from various regions of the UK and Ireland over two days, and the standards were high. It’s not an easy thing as a parent to […]
Ordinary People The Irish singer-songwriter, Christy Moore, wrote a beautiful song in 1985 called ‘Ordinary Man.’ It’s set against the backdrop of economic struggle and high unemployment, which was the reality for so many in Ireland in the early 1980’s. It spoke of being let go from a factory after many years of faithful service, […]
The Importance of Remembering As we get a bit older we tend to look back on certain periods of our lives for different reasons. I look back on my twenties as a decade of travel and with great fondness. I lived abroad for a couple of years and that allowed me to travel to neighbouring […]
Learning to Go Slow I recently had some days of leave over half term and, as we drifted around not doing very much, I caught a wonderful series of documentaries I had recorded over the summer. It was called ‘Europe by Train’ and it was made by a journalist and environmentalist called Manchan Magan. I […]
Learning from the Masters It’s always a joy to watch people who are really good at what they do. I spent a few hours recently in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast watching some of the best snooker players in the world battling it out to become the Northern Ireland Open Champion. It’s amazing to get […]
Shining a Light on World Mental Health Day Last Thursday was World Mental Health Day. It’s a day that could have slipped our attention. There were some items on the radio I heard as I was driving in the car. Many people are much more open these days in discussing our mental health, but there’s […]