Christmas cheese 2025.

Christmas cheese 2025. A tradition upheld, on time, with only the publicising of it delayed. Many excellent cheeses, bought from Sheridan's Cheesemongers on South Anne Street in Dublin just before Christmas, and very much enjoyed.

Against violence.

I could just refer the honorable gentlepeople to my blog post of August 2025. I feel much the same. I have not done the things I thought I might do last month, about events, or this month, about online safety for children. I have thought about violence and how violence may be the foundational and unifying problem with much that is wrong with humanity. Violence by humans against all that is or that they perceive to be other than human. Then violence by powerful humans against humans who are or who they perceive to be less powerful. Violence by men against women. Violence by adults against children. Violence by white people against black people, and by any powerful ethnic group against less powerful ethnic groups. Violence based on disability, on sexuality, on nationality. Violence. Based on anything, on nothing. Violence. It is a start and an end.

What's on.

Twenty-five years ago I became frustrated with how difficult it was to find out what was on in Dublin and Ireland, what was happening that I might be interested in attending or knowing more about, so I set up a simple website to keep track of events and essentially create a centralised calendar that I could refer to. I made it a website because I figured if I was irritated by this, other people might be too, and they might also find such a guide useful. And so it was. I constructed it and at first I entered all the information myself, in a format I found accessible. By the end people frequently contacted me to submit their info, I included a form that made that easier, and more and more people were reading the guide. Twenty-five years later and little seems to have improved. I am having the same problem that spurred me to create that website in 2000. I spent hours a week or so ago trying to find out what was on for the October bank holiday weekend, for Halloween and thenabouts. I searched through dozens of websites, tried and failed to access various proprietary media artefacts, and even looked at words and pictures printed on paper. I visited easily 100 different information locations, without much success, each one listing some unique events, some events that overlapped with many other sites, and some events where it was unclear whether they were happening this year, last year or at all. There is information overload but reliable, easily accessible and comprehensive information about what is going on still appears extremely difficult and time-consuming to find. So perhaps I need to (re)create my guide, a quarter century later. More to come.

Sept ember.

It's the end of September. Past the equinox. Past the new year. Getting to the end of the Days of Awe. A swim at Seapoint in the truth and hold of the waves. Culture Night with bread, drums and giant gallery projections. After school extra-curriculars and full day pick-ups and trying to adult our way into a term-time routine. War and destruction and violence and deaths and more deaths. A concert in Wembley together for Palestine. An anti-racism carnival after the rain. Sleeps and wakes and anger and joy and exhaustion and resignation and happiness and loss. An American football game in Croke Park. The absences of some, the presences of others. A month. Seven fires? Still burning. Still here.

Not perfectionism.

Mackerel sky over Dublin, 9th August 2025.

It is late. And I am very tired. And there is too much going on. After years, a decade? more? of writing a blog post every month, I have not written a blog post for, checks files, five months. And this is barely one. But it is one. I have been reflecting on perfectionism, and not being a perfectionist, on opportunity costs, on refusing to face mortality, on believing I can do more than is possible, on wanting to do more than is possible, on hurling myself against the brick wall of the impossible, on stumbling exhausted in the dark towards the precipice of the impossible, and how not to fall, and how to keep walking, on how to stay alive in a life worth living in a world worth living in. And mostly the answer now is to go to bed. And announce that I’m still here.

Partial solar eclipse.

A partial solar eclipse in Dublin, Ireland on 29th March 2025.

Sunset swim at Seapoint on 25th December 2024.

At around 4p.m. on 25th December 2024 I went swimming at Seapoint, at sunset, in the spot pictured above. It was beautiful, calm, peaceful, enlivening, and not all that cold. I was in solitude in the sea, loved ones on the shore, a few other people about to swim or having already swum or encouraging others to swim, but I was alone in the water. Another tradition repeated. It helped. I am grateful. We swim on.