Some friends kindly left us look after their cottage on an island off west Cork during the past month. Each Friday, we packed the kids into the car straight after school and rushed westward to catch the ferry. As soon as we stepped ashore on the island, we entered into another world, where time goes…

A friend sent on an old picture from our village when I was a boy. When a picture from your childhood looks like something from another world, you know you’re getting older. Although my childhood took place not too long ago, in the 1980s, I do remember Ireland as being a very different country back then.…

Like many parents, thanks to the lockdown, I’ve been moonlighting as a hairdresser. With the actual hairdressers being closed these last months, we’ve had no choice but to take matters into our own hands. My wife even ordered a proper hairdressers’ scissors and combs online, to give us an undeserved air of professionalism. With these…

The kids are now in the final term of a very strange school year. My youngest, who is in senior infants, has had most of her school career disrupted by the pandemic. The older kids can learn remotely more easily, and could even stay in touch with their classmates online. The sense of isolation was…

My two-year-old has now spent most of her life under coronavirus restrictions. Of course, she doesn’t understand the bigger picture, but she does know that, at times, the Government stops the older children from going to school and her from going to her beloved childminder. She knows that sometimes we are not allowed go to…

After the drear of an Irish winter, the first few sunny spring days seem almost miraculous. As the gloom wore on, month after month, it seemed that never again would we rest easy in the sunshine. The Irish climate makes moments of luxuriating comfortably in nature rare, and therefore precious. Yet all of a sudden,…

Children have an amazing ability to escape into the present moment, far more easily than we adults do. Since my mother died, the children have spent plenty of time lost in sorrow and reminiscence, and enough time crying. Yet in just a few minutes, they can switch from being immersed in heartfelt sadness over a…

The world is a poorer place. My beautiful mother Anne has died. She had been in hospital for an operation and sadly contracted coronavirus in there. For the first week of the illness, we held out hope, since she remained cheerful and vibrant as ever. Yet we knew that a grim moment of truth was…

Parents often protect their children from worry, through the simple expedient of not telling them about worrying things. There’s certainly no need to worry small children about crimes such as murder, for example. Yet we do tell them about dangers of traffic, as the worrying knowledge that cars can hurt of kill you encourages them…

This has been the longest January in recorded history. The month began about ten years ago, as I watched as Big Ben ominously ticked down the seconds to 2021 with my wife and our two oldest kids. Instead of our usual cheerful New Year’s gathering of friends and family, it was just the four of…