Politics-free Zone

The bishop lived in a big house across the wall from our boarding school. On slow summer evenings we’d peep over and watch him playing croquet by himself, sometimes muttering and hammering the mallet into the ground when he missed a  hoop.  The grass on his side was as neat as a bee-bop haircut and […]

Here comes another year…That’s 2015…or maybe  you like to call it two thousand  and fifteen. We called every year of the previous century 19-88 or  19-67 …or maybe 19-99, but suddenly when we hit the mighty 21st century, it  was two thousand and one or two thousand and two and what have you….Well if it […]

https://soundcloud.com/hugh-midden-speaks/beards-17-12-14   BEARDS. Have you noticed recently that the closer we get to Christmas, (like Santa’s elves, or characters from “The Hobbit” and “Game of Thrones”), men, young men especially, walk among us, in our streets, with bespoke beards. Bold framed brainy glasses, unusual shoes and tight canvas trousers breed like rabbits. Faster than germs […]

They’re wrangling on the radio about  whether or not there should be subtitles  put on regional accents on television programmes. Some apparently find it insulting to do a thing like that . Some assume that the listener or watcher should simply accept the accent as it is  and get on with it .That’s a fair […]

  It is a pleasant enough day today. It’s quite mild for December . In fact it’s perfect  sort of weather to get a few outside jobs sorted out. I couldn’t do much at the bottom of the garden throughout the Summer and Autumn because the honeybees stayed very active late into the year .Here […]

Dear…dear…dear. They’re raving away on the radio about Ouija boards.Perfectly normal people are telling tales of horror about their awful supernatural experiences with this  board game ,with its  numbers and letters of the alphabet. Of course all the stories are predicated on the fundamental beliefs of the people involved .Simply put: if you believe in […]

It’s a beautiful morning . A crisp November day. The rains and gloom have scampered off into some corner in the sky and left this huge blue spotless dome hanging above us, rays of sunshine lighting up the plain, unpainted ,wooden  fence outside; bringing the grain to new life. There is no wind whatsoever  and […]

  You’d think that the world was wholly misogynistic if you cared to read and listen to many of the recent newspaper, magazine, radio, television and any other media articles  of  recent vintage .Women are being treated abysmally throughout the world .You’d imagine that the feminism of the 1970s had never happened and that many […]

Walls. 18.11.14 By Randall Stephen Hall. https://soundcloud.com/hugh-midden-speaks/walls-19-11-14   From platform four at Central. Central Station, Belfast. I stood and waited for the train That would take me to Whitehead.   An Ceann Bán.   Not so long ago I would stand And wait for the same train. But something had changed. The view.   For […]

I’ve decided , looking out at the outside world , that this dreary weather is not conducive to any kind of creative or physical  activity. It must be something to do with the chemical balance of the brain .That feel-good chemical.serotonin ..isn’t kicking in. I’m not quite ready for one of those SAD {That’s “Seasonal […]