The Celts

Beaumaris, by the window

10/11/2022 12:24
“L'absence n'est-elle pas la plus certaine, la plus efficace, la plus vivace, la plus indestructible, la plus fidèle des présences?” Marcel Proust Beaumaris is a pretty little town that straddles one end of the Menai Strait. It separates the island of Anglesey from the rest of Wales. Cute and tiny...

Joyce's Tower

20/05/2022 09:05
On the outskirts of Dublin city there is an old defence tower. It is in front of the coast and it inspired the great Irish writer James Joyce the beginning of his encyclopaedic human adventure of Ulysses with a Mass parody by the character Buck Mulligan. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the...

Joyce's Dublin

01/04/2022 09:30
Each June 16 a group of weird people start a walk through the streets of Dublin. It’s supposed they already have breakfast. It is assumed that pig kidney fried in butter with a pinch of black pepper. The tour begins in an Eccles Street doorway, north of the River Liffey. At the Georgian building...

Ulster Murals

28/01/2022 09:20
Belfast has scars from the Troubles days. Scars as the seventeen sectors separated by walls even today in some areas of the city closings doors at six o'clock in the evening. But not all scars lack a certain charm. Also stays hundreds of political content paintings that fill the townhouses rows...

Black Gold

02/10/2020 10:14
Each time I look at her silently I have the same sentence in my thoughts: my Goodness, she’s so good! Before I have been watching quietly, catching every small detail, with the certain imminent hedonistic pleasure, with the same calm with which she becomes full, and knowing the subtle and deep...

Satori in Brest

01/06/2020 08:44
The word Satori, in Japanese, means understanding, comprehension. Also, in Zen Buddhism is applied at the time of deep and ultimate enlightenment. A clairvoyant instant related to creation and discovery. And that happened in a taxi! Or maybe the reason could have been the Brest foggy streets, or a...

A Neverending Name

10/08/2018 10:05
Crossed Britannia Bridge, one of the two crossing the narrow stretch of sea that split the island of Anglesey or Ynnis Môn and Wales, there’s a town not known for its monuments because basically lacks of them, or by its church of Saint Mary or any imaginable tourist attraction as the column of the...

The City of Writers

09/02/2018 10:57
Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, looks like to have attracted in some special way to a significant number of writers. Numerous authors have been born or lived in the city, to the point that there are several monuments and a museum dedicated to them. Near Holyrood, on the slopes of the ancient...

Lady Isabella

28/04/2017 09:42
I will not say she’s like on her first day, but Lady Isabella is remarkably well preserved after been long surpassed its first century and a half. Another lady, Lady Dundas unveiled on September 27, 1954 a plaque to commemorate the centenary. Lady Isabella is nothing less, a huge waterwheel 72 feet...

Ulster's Best

20/05/2016 18:07
He was called the fifth Beatle, but he wasn’t a musician. He played the balls, but generally only did so with the feet. And they say that, according his name, he was the best soccer player world had ever seen. On the other hand he was the only idol of the sixties shared by both Catholic and...

The Book of Kells

29/09/2015 09:40
Kells is a small town in County Meath which has about five thousand inhabitants. It’s so far as tewnty four miles from Dublin. The M3 motorway has approached considerably the capital reducing travel time and making it an easy alternative to dwell. Twelve hundred years before there was yet to build...

Rias Baixas

02/07/2015 11:33
They say God created the universe in seven days. They say on the seventh He rested. They also say that going to rest lean his hand on Earth, in Galicia, where they said He left the imprint of his fingers deeply marked. That piece of land is Rias Baixas, the footprint is the sea going deep inland,...

Cancale Oysters

30/03/2015 17:16
- Madame! Une douzaine des sauvages, s'il vous plait! With the skill provided by boredom and the constant repetition of the same movements, the lady at the counter wields the short-handled knife with protection and a blunt edge. With an automatic gesture, almost involuntary, looking to separate the...

Arthur's Cradle

14/11/2014 20:49
At bird's eye view Tintagel is a closed bend on the map. Just a couple of miles where all the shops in town looms. First on Bossiney Road, then in Fore Street. There, on the right Lewis', formerly The Riggs, a charming B & B with four bedrooms in a small wooden sixteenth century mansion, offers...

Dylan (Thomas)

26/10/2014 12:59
Simon & Garfunkel sang in 1966 a ballad titled A Simple Desultory Philippic. One of the verses said He’s so unhip, that when you say Dylan, he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain’t got no culture. The first Dylan is Bob Dylan, or Robert Allen Zimmerman in its...
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