Probably the best time to write is in the early morning where, as Grace Slick would have sung, the mind is moving raw. Imagery and dreamy sleep are still feeding into the brain as the body struggles, remembering, groggily how to breathe deeply and the sting in the tea is heating the belly furnace down […]
August, 2014
THE GREEN AND BLUE by Randall Stephen Hall
“The Green and Blue” originally entitled “Song for You and Me”. https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/the-green-and-blue-18-7-13 I grew up in Belfast, never really relating to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, between Unionists and Nationalists. I grew up a Presbyterian, quite different, from the broad brush stroke term, “Protestant”. I always felt like an outsider, while, as a human […]
Gaza: the view from the Sindo
I have to hand it to my old chum Eoghan Harris – he’s nothing if not consistent. (He’s also honourable, I must add: with just a bit of nudging he coughed up on a 10-1 bet I took with him some years ago, which he lost. Ach sin sceal eile…) In today’s Sindo, he manages […]
Republicans and reconciliation: time for a rethink?
I was talking to a man the other night, after the Colin Parry/Martin McGuinness discussion in St Mary’s University College. The point came up that it’s sixteen years since the Good Friday Agreement, republicans have been following a policy of reconciliation with former adversaries and has this policy borne fruit? Well, that bit was easy: the answer […]
One night, two events
I was at two events last night. The first was the launch of yet another book about Belfast cemeteries by Tom Hartley. St Dominic’s on the Falls Road was bunged with the great and the good – Maurice Hayes, Rev John Dunlop, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and many, many more. I would have given my left […]