Cogito ergo sum . The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions. Phew. Take a breather. He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti...

Who are you? What are you? For a memoir a bit of backstory is needed. Try and fit ‘patriot’ into a single sentence in as many forms as you can manage. It’s on the book cover. The man who resigned because of a government cover-up. A smearing campaign against a patriotic whistle blower. I made notes and watched a documentary on Prime. If the world has a cancerous growth called global warming, wouldn’t it want to know? Eh, nope. Many of the tactics...

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a reader who writes. You can’t be a writer who doesn’t read. Writing is secondary and often unnecessary, but I claim it as a calling of sorts. ‘I know no one wants to hear me say how hard writing is—quit while you can’. I liked Goldberg telling me that. Reminding me that. I’m pretty good at making starts. The equivalent of joining the gym on the New Year and promising to go swimming and sauna once a week too. I’...

Young Lovers Anna de Vos & Buster Brown ~ Mamma & Sons ~ Chintsa Camping ~ Tom PhD graduation Selby & Mother ~ Anna Brown Our Late Mother

A dead bookmaker. A rushed verdict. Inspector Crowe isn’t buying it. When a celebrity bookie washes up on the Dublin coast, Garda Inspector P.J. Crowe is dragged into a violent world of dog fights, crypto crime, and powerful men who want the truth buried. The Payout Game is gritty Irish noir for fans of Stuart MacBride and Tana French — fast, atmospheric, and impossible to put down. The Payout Game is now available for pre-order on Amazon!...

So I was reading “The Hollow Men,” Eliot, and it broke on me, came to me, yes, it must be a hollow point bullet. A hollow point expands on impact, expands and stretches and transfers its damage. Expands. Stretches. Expands. Transfers. Expands. Like a starburst. Like fungus. That’s the way to do it. Expansion. Death by a bullet’s real estate. Amazing, really, the damage that a single caliber with a dipped tip causes. It shrooms. Mushrooms. Like a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mrgq/the-idea-of-you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_of_You Straightforward rom-com. What’s the hook? Solène Marchand uses the wrong toilet. I used to do it quite a lot. Pee up closes and against the side of the bus at football matches. But it has to be a lot classier. Cause Solene is really Anne Hathaway. It needs to be something better than that. You can’t just have Anne Hathaway peeing outside...

This Day Making sense of it all? The disappearance of the revenant from the ashes, you return, rise like curl. As smoke signals, from the day you left. Shedding skin like a broken leaf, softly the night fades. Departing, where do they go? On a long journey to nowhere, with those fleeting moments drawing memories that wisp alone, along the waterfront, images of tossed Ashes. Yet you rise like a moth to a flame close to me. When we once chased...

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...

Flash Mob Just over half way from Amlwch to our nearest ‘big’ town, Bangor, the coast road crosses the old branch railway to Red Wharf Bay. It was my father who pointed out to me, sometime in the mid-seventies, the flash and circle emblem painted on the dark red brickwork of the bridge parapet. I’d imagined it was some sort of warning about buried electric cables. As graffiti goes, it was quite neatly done, in white paint, and in the mid-1970s...