I’ll be honest, the reaction was a bit muted here in this house when I proposed a week in Bulgaria for a beach holiday. The kids looked blankly as they’d had never heard of Bulgaria before but then again, that’s the same as much of the world, at least the …
“That’s just rude!” said the boy indignantly, standing at the till at Padraig’s Pound Shop in Tuam, County, Galway, Ireland last week. “Believe me, it’s not. Now come on!” said I, as I hustled all three of us out the door on to the main street of the town. …
I sat in a theatre on the fifth floor of the Henrik Ibsen museum on Bloomsday and pondered about Ireland, as I often do from a distance here in Norway. Ireland is a fundamental part of the making and shaping of me, after all. Bloomsday is the most Irish of …
We’re nearing the end of another school year here in Oslo. And as with much of Europe at the moment, the weather is glorious. It’s 7.30am and it’s 26 C out there with blasting blue-skied sunshine. For the last few weeks, it’s felt like we’ve shifted 3,000 km to the …
In my day, in Ireland, the debs, short for, god help us, the Debutante Ball was the big celebration for ending secondary school. It was one night, but you agonised for months beforehand about who you were ‘bringing to the debs’ if you weren’t going steady with someone. Because you …
There are still stones everywhere, remnants of winter grit: small, annoying, gritty stones all over our street, in the flower beds beside the street, in the car park, in the school playground, on the way to work, everywhere that counts in my daily range of operation. And I clearly walk …
It’s a story that’s been almost impossible to escape recently, how a political consulting firm managed to siphon off personal data of millions of Facebook users and then use it for political targeting. Shocking. So, this week, I decided to download my Facebook file to see what exactly they could …
Anyone who rings me on a weekday evening during school term will have heard me mention the words, lunch boxes. I’m about to make the lunch boxes. Or maybe I’ve got to go as I need to make the lunch boxes now. Or the best possible scenario; No, all is …
We moved to Oslo from London with two small kids almost 5 years ago. Well, as happens, the kids are not so small anymore and had been waxing lyrical about London for some time now, fascinated by this place that they were born in, that we tell them stories about, …
My kids had been to visit a friend’s house recently and had eaten middags or their evening meal there. All went well but the Mamma pulled me aside afterwards and said that she had to correct my son at the table. Right, I said nervously, hoping that he hadn’t had a fit …
