Category Archives: Unreliable memories

While I have spent the past two days attending meetings and preparing classes at my new school in Dublin, my nephews are still enjoying the penultimate week of the summer holidays. The new term at Huish Episcopi does not begin … Continue reading →

It is forty years ago today, on 24th August 1981, that Mark Chapman was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for the murder of John Lennon. By the time I began buying records in the mid-1970s, John Lennon was in his … Continue reading →

Sitting at a cafe in Dublin at 5.30 pm yesterday, the phone rang. I stepped away from the tables and stood in an entrance just off Ann Street. The head teacher of a Dublin school offered me a post in … Continue reading →

The school would close that summer as the county switched to comprehensive education, the gentle ethos of a bygone age would disappear. But on an afternoon in January 1973, there was excitement among the staff as a teacher at Elmhurst … Continue reading →

In childhood years, did everyone stare into the flames in the fireplace and see shapes and figures and imagine tales of long ago or is it a personal eccentricity? My grandmother on the farm lived frugally, but once the latter … Continue reading →