This is no ordinary day, I think. The morning sun blinks out from a January sky and there are things to do that I have always done, but still I know that this day will probably change my life. I get the children ready. They chuckle at a cartoon on the television and wriggle themselves reluctantly into their coats. I’m trying to keep everything normal. I take my son to nursery and my daughter to school. They are very young. …
I borrowed John Banville’s new book Snow from the library over Christmas. It is a detective story set in 1950s Ireland. It has all the elements of your classic golden age mystery, a dead body in the library of a rural stately home in winter. Winter is one of the key characters of the book. A lot of time is given over the cold of Winter and specifically the cold of the fading country house. The family in the story …
I know a crazy amount of people who have gotten Covid in the past week or two, I imagine you are the same. People are tumbling like bowling pins. Thankfully so far hospital admissions seem to be low. From the NI Covid Dashboard: We are hoping that Omicron is not as harmful, but it is early days yet. The best-case scenario is if it is mild it will rip through the population in a few weeks then dies out. Some …
I have written on Slugger in the past, about the challenges I faced during my treatment for breast cancer some thirty years ago. Written from the perspective of someone at the receiving end, it was relatively straightforward for me to put into words what my reactions were and how I dealt with the various ongoing issues any serious illness can impose upon an individual. A great many articles about ill health are from that personal point of view, but what …
As you know we had to cancel our live event last night (but you can now book for the streaming version this Wednesday night). Yesterday morning before we took the decision to cancel, I was getting lots of emails from people who had booked tickets saying they could not make it as they thought they had Covid. I could sympathise as yesterday even I was wondering if I had it. I woke up with a sore head. I was out …
I would be in Lidl once or twice a week and nearly every time I get to witness the wonder of the big line. What happens is instead of queuing behind each checkout as you are meant to do, a huge line forms around one till. The line is always in the aisle with the cleaning products, never any other aisle. There is no pattern to the big line, it can happen in the morning, the afternoon, when the store …
Philip O’Neill is a Slugger reader from Belfast I have just spent 40 mins on a bus journey into Belfast. Since the start of the pandemic, I have not used public transport as I had concerns as to so many people from different ‘bubbles’ being so close together in a very confined space. I soon recognized the bus journey was a small but representative microcosm of our society. Fewer than half the people on the bus were wearing masks, some …
Omicron is all over the media, much to the surprise of Angelique Coetzee the South African doctor who first discovered the new strain. South African Dr Angelique Coetzee first raised the alarm over the Omicron variant and says the rest of the world is over-reacting. "Patients I've seen had mild symptoms and recovered. None were admitted and no oxygen was needed. The hype makes no sense to at all."@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/c14pbzveN6 — talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) November 29, 2021 Fear sells and the …
I spent part of Sunday applying for my dad’s Vaccine Certificate. Each time I do the process I get faster, but as I have discussed before they sure do make you jump through a lot of hoops. He got the certificate today and I got it installed on his iPhone and all was well. But then I had a problem, what to do about my mum? My mum does not have a mobile phone never mind a smartphone, so how …
Amid all the debate around lockdowns, vaccine passports, rising Covid figures etc it is important to remember that every death is a tragedy. In Friday’s Irish News there was the story about a 48-year-old father of 9 from Downpatrick who has died of Covid: THE family of a father-of-nine who died following a nine-week battle with Covid have told how his passing has left them “numb”. Ivor Wilcox (48), who lived in Downpatrick, died at the Ulster Hospital on Tuesday. …
The Executive has decided to introduce vaccine passports by mid-December. Whatever your views on the issue, there is a major problem in that I believe the verification process will not be able to handle the demand. I applied for my vaccine passport on Tuesday night and the process was extremely complicated. The main issue for people seems to be getting their identity verified on NI Direct. They could not verify my identity despite me: Having a full drivers license Living …
When a parent with young children is diagnosed with incurable cancer, this has an immediate and devastating impact not only for the person hearing the diagnosis, but for the whole family. New research findings from the ‘Family-centred Cancer Care’ programme of work led by a team of researchers at the Institute of Nursing and Health Research, Ulster University has been addressing how parents often need advice and support to navigate these unchartered waters. Health and social care professionals are well …
Air pollution has become much more widely recognised as a public health issue in recent years. In 2020 a London coroner ruled that air pollution was a contributing factor in the 2013 death of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah, citing a failure to reduce air pollution to legal limits. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of air pollution on health has been called further into question. As researchers we were keen to understand how exposure to air pollution might impact health …
I described the first part of my Magical Mystery Tour earlier this year (here). ’The time has come’, as the Walrus might have said, ‘to talk of many things’. Time now for an update on how my journey is evolving; I would say that it’s not so much Magical as very Mystery. Part 1 was written before some more strange detours, though published afterwards. Basically, the oul boiler sprang some sort of leak and was losing pressure, so the loco …
For the first time in months, I went to a bar on Friday night. As I have written before, I have more or less stopped drinking as I could not stand the hangovers any longer. But I was curious to try the new Guinness 0.0 so off we went to the Errigle on the Ormeau Road. As I was going to try the non-alcoholic beer I was able to drive. As we have discussed, getting a taxi these days is …
This winter is looking absolutely grim. Supply problems for shops, staff shortages, health services on the verge of collapse it just gets bleaker and bleaker. The latest kick in the nuts is energy prices are expected to surge once again. From the Irish News: RISING costs have left the average consumer in the north paying £1,000 more for energy than last year, amid the worst price shock since the 1970s. Northern Ireland’s Utility Regulator has warned that soaring wholesale gas …
In the often mundane world of Assembly questions a recent response by the Minister for the Economy, Gordon Lyons is remarkable in its implications. First among these is the potential for a re-run of the Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI) situation whereby taxpayers continued to make good bad financial and policy calculations on a massive scale. In response to a question by the Green Party’s Rachel Woods, the Minister for the Economy, Gordon Lyons, stated that: ‘I am not in a …
The 2020 COVID pandemic turned Belfast into a desolate city. Shops, schools, pubs, restaurants, churches all closed. The city’s usually bustling streets took on an eerie atmosphere. The lack of cars, planes and taxis created an ominous silence. Part of COVID’s defining experience was how unique it felt to us. We hadn’t experienced a pandemic for an entire century since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed 50,000,000 people worldwide. However, historically, disease outbreaks were a day-to-day occurrence and part of life. …
“The past holds us captive. Even when we succeed in giving up slights, grudges, feuds and pride, we cannot easily give up knowledge, memories and experience.” – David Amerland At the weekend, Colm Tóibín wrote scathingly of some southern politicians that “their talk of a united Ireland ‘in my lifetime’ is mystical blather; another example of politicians saying something they don’t mean”. Ouch. Yet, there are some political leaders in the ‘anglosphere’ who seem to be trying to reconnect to …
We are living in strange times. History tells us that after a major crisis the stock market tanks, we get a recession and unemployment goes up. This is the boom and bust cycle. Except for this time… Governments have embraced Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and have been pumping money into the system to keep the economy afloat. The result is the markets are actually up and instead of massive unemployment but have a massive skill shortage. I am a fan …
