Harried we were, and spent,/broken and falling,/ere as the cranes we went,/crying and calling.//Summer shall see the bird/backward returning;/never shall there be heard/those, who went yearning.//Emptied of us the land;/ghostly our going;/fallen like spears the hand/dropped in the throwing./We are the lost who went,/like the cranes, crying;/hunted, lonely and spent/broken and dying. Extract from poem by Mary GilmoreMore

Letters From Quotidia Episode 70 The Dispossessed

I am going to take you now to an exhibition in a pub that will require you to walk past urinals while a woman dressed in a communion dress reads lewd poetry.More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 69 Tomorrow's Zero

I taught for nine years in the 1980s at Ballymena Academy, the alma mater of Sir Roger. While I was there, they did not acknowledge him, in any meaningful way. I wonder if this is still the situation at the school? More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 17

...at Hanakapiai Beach, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai where a sign warns, do not go near the water, unseen currents have killed-what follows is a tally in chalk on the board and you can see the most recent death toll by counting the tally. As of August 2014 there were 83 tally marks.More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 20 Counting Game

Seamus Heaney, shaken by the events of 9/11, wrote Anything Can Happen based on Ode 34 of Book 1. Anything can happen, the tallest towers/Be overturned, those in high places daunted,/Those overlooked regarded./ He talks of Fortune as a bird of prey tearing the crest off one,/Setting it down bleeding on the next. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 67 Anything Can Happen

Arriving in Aussie in August 1972, I found that I fit right in- a bit of an indictment really, in the light of what Ronald Conway had to say in his book The Great Australian Stupor, where he painted the Australian male as a completely inadequate father, selfish husband and incompetent lover, who took refuge from his inadequacies at the pub. Ouch! More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 66 The Long Weekend

...then I spotted a student politician from Queen’s University, Belfast, with whom I had been in disputation at an earlier student conference, not sloping off, as I was, but running towards the police lines and, indeed, hopping into the Black Maria, without law-and-order assistance. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 65 Homebase

Stephen Foster died much too soon at age 37. The wowsers of the time were smug, characterising him as a “drunkard” who wrote songs about “pathetic people”. Well, he’s remembered and revered 150 years after his death while his mean-spirited critics have sunk into well-deserved oblivion. More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards edition 16

...the golden record affixed to the space-craft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. From the world of classical music, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnston and Chuck Berry from the realm of popular music. Incredibly, EMI refused permission to have the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun included because of copyright concerns! More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 64 Whatever Comes

...the silence was eloquent: he was a turncoat, a lundy. The latter word is a Northern Irish colloquialism which is derived from the name of the governor of Derry in the 18th century, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Lundy, who was suspected of Catholic sympathies by the Protestant community. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 63 Hold Me Love Me