How to lose a home in Ten Easy Steps On August 7, 2013, the sheriff will officially seize my house, my former home. Unlike some other high profile bankrupts, I don’t have secondary houses to fall back on. I haven’t relocated to America or I don’t swan around the world on yachts. I had one home and on August 7th I will be officially homeless. Now, don’t worry, I only mean homeless as in lacking a home that I once had. In fact, for the past four years I have been renting a cottage nearby with my two children and various animals. I rent a very beautiful cottage with panoramic views across the local little hills. My old home has panoramic views also, but across to Mount Leinster as befits the central house of a townland, for Raheengraney House is named for its region. I don’t think I will be there to witness the surrender of my once beautiful home. It has been a long time since I was there, maybe January of this year, and I don’t relish the thought of a sheriff changing locks or putting up yellow tape to stop trespassers. On August 7th, I will become […]
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See You at the Pictures
Yesterday I was invited by Planet Korda to come share my filmic experiences for a documentary called ‘See you at the Pictures’. I had seen the tweet calling for people to be featured and had wracked my brains to think of any interesting anecdotes to tell. I love films, proper ones, but go much less frequently than I might. Living in the country contributes to this, although when I lived in Raheengraney House we had our own home cinema in the basement. The big screen in the low ceiling room with huge speakers and sub woofers and other pieces of canine sounding technology quite beyond me, created a pretty amazing cinematic experience. The large, old and tatty grey elephant leather sofas made for comfortable reclining and of course since we were at home all manner of refreshments were on hand. Since quitting Raheengraney, I have been forced to attend the real McCoy to see films. My children often watch films online but since our taste in films is quite different, this is not a natural combination. I don’t really like romcom (especially bad romcom of which there is a lot), actively dislike slasher films, and those superhero remakes leave me […]
Continue readingHow do you find the middle?
Bang in the Middle! Jillian Godsil became divorced. Her ex husband became bankrupt and she was left with a million euro mortgage on a house worth half that. This is her story about being in the middle. How do you know when you are in the middle? Is it by age, experience or weight? As the Ardal O’Hanlon joke goes, everyone wants to know your weight at birth but no one wants to know at death. So how can we tell where we are? Age is equally arbitrary; genes and luck count in unequal amounts; some of the healthiest people I know have been struck down in car accidents, lives wrenched horribly short. Or do the gods wait for us to complete our own personal bucket list? And what if we are too conservative or wildly over-optimistic? Does that have any bearing on what we get to finish and can we keep on topping that list up every year if we are lucky enough to reach those ambitions? I am hoping I am only at the middle. It feels a bit like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell: she may have pleaded for everyone to believe in fairies; I […]
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