“By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling” – The Dubliners. This is Nelson’s Triumph. Make no mistake about that. There has been something really weird and odd that has happened to me a few times on my journeys. Life has been really crazy how it all worked out for me –…
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“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” – Margaret Thatcher, 1987 In this ongoing random series called The Day I… I detail spontaneous and often idiotic moments from my travels. I don’t really like “normality” that much and I always prefer the extraordinary over the…
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Politics aside…being from Northern Ireland has often led to confusion over the years. I find most people still use the word Ireland to describe as my country, Ireland isn’t in fact a country, but is an island consisting of two countries, Northern Ireland (of six counties, and of British occupation but whose residents are free…
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You hear talk about it when you’re in Australia. People that hear you’ve been to Canberra will say “oh, did you go to the war memorial?”, so you’ve kind of got to go there, just so you can give a positive answer to those questions. But really when I first heard of a War Memorial…
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A trip to Australia’s Parliament House was in order when I was backpacking in Canberra in January 2010. I have never been inside my own Parliament! Neither Belfast’s Stormont nor London’s House of Commons or House of Lords. Yet I’ve done Canberra, Australia. There are two Parliament buildings. There’s an old one at the…
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It was mid November 2009 and we were in our first few weeks in Parramatta, Australia where I worked in the awesome PJ Gallagher’s Irish Pub. We lived with Ruben and Rebecca. Rebecca was working for the local government in New South Wales. When she mentioned she was organising a public conference in the last week…
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Today before work, I took my polling card to the local Methodist church in Southbourne and voted. I have always believed everyone should vote, and I normally look down on those who don’t. You can hardly blame me, I come from Northern Ireland. I am proud that I have voted in every possible election in…
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I found myself exposed to the innocence of communism a few times. I had never seen Eastern Europe before the wall came down. But I had savoured the drab, greyness of a growing Varshava in 2005. I also strode my skeleton through the streets of Beijing in hope of finding an answer to the question…
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Back in 1998 in those glory days when simply watching Northern Ireland playing football or getting pished down the Wins (Bangor) or the Monico (Belfast) I happenned to help with an election campaign. It wasn’t by chance and it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was just because I had just turned 18 and life…
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