Florence Nightingale, who was born 200 years ago, is rightly famed for revolutionising nursing. Her approach to caring for wounded soldiers and training nurses in the 19th century saved and improved countless lives. And her ideas on how to stay healthy still resonate today – as politicians give official guidance on how best to battle coronavirus. For […]
My reading suggestion for these difficult times is probably not very original, undoubtedly challenging, but also certainly fully worth trying. It’s Dante’s La Divina Commedia. The quarantine we are experiencing or will be experiencing soon gives us much more time than we usually have; it forces us to stay inside, and it leads us to ponder […]
The deadly flu pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have taken 50 million lives – more than were lost in World War I, and National Geographic says it is believed to have originated in China. This 2014 article on the origins of the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 is now going viral again as the […]
During this incredibly difficult time, it’s easy to focus on all of the darkness, pain and suffering going on around the world and within our own communities. People are suffering and dying of Covid-19, others have lost their jobs, while others are struggling because their businesses were forced to close or their hours were cut. […]
Back in December I added Susan Cain’s Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, which was first published in 2012, to my reading list for 2020. At the time nobody could have imagined that Covid-19 would force large numbers of people around the world to literally stop talking and hole up […]
Albert Uderzo, the co-creator of the Asterix comic books (with his friend René Goscinny, who died in 1977), passed away this week at the age of 92. Such is the all-encompassing nature of the current pandemic that multiple media outlets felt it necessary to specify that the old artist had not, in fact, died from […]
It seems that ‘[y]achtbrokers have seen a surge in bookings as people fleeing the coronavirus crisis look to go into isolation for months afloat’ (‘Demand for luxury yachts fuelled by self-isolation of super-rich’, Telegraph Business, March 23, 2020). As someone who has been involuntarily confined to barracks for a number of years there are a […]
Niamh wrote something of a polemic on this site last week about that god-awful “celebrities singing Imagine by John Lennon” video, declaring that “the level of self-awareness (in the video) is between zero and minus infinity”. Well Niamh, I have some bad news. Just take a look. https://twitter.com/Madonna/status/1241768707631841281 Where’s it all going to end? If […]
You’ve had a baby, it’s great! You look to the future with promise and hope, and trust that those around you will be as positive as they were throughout the last nine months. Not long after those short-lived congrats for your pregnancy, you were probably swamped with statements such as ‘oh the mayhem never stops…your […]
A new book from Ross Douthat argues that it is. A few days it was my birthday. I am 35 now and so am feeling proper-old. Not elderly, but like a proper grown-up. I suppose three children, a house, a mortgage, a job and an aching knee should be enough to remind me of my […]
This week marked the centenary of the killing of Tomás MacCurtáin, Mayor of Cork, who was shot dead by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) on March 20th, 1920. MacCurtain had been elected the first Republican Mayor of Cork City, and was assassinated in front of his family in a premeditated attack planned by the RIC with the […]
So apparently there’s this illness going around at the moment, you might have heard about it, kind of a big deal. Sorry, don’t mean to be flippant – it is my defence mechanism. For a number of weeks now I have been viewing the COVID-19 outbreak in other parts of the world with some interest but […]