We own a small patch of bog. It’s there on the land deed, matter-of-fact as a boundary wall - a stretch of cutaway outside Castlebar that came with the land, the way a bad roof or a draughty outhouse might. Except it isn’t a liability.

My grandmother bought homemade country butter.

There’s a particular Irish talent for moral outrage that conveniently stops at the point where it might cost us something.

There was a funeral I recall from a few years back - a handyman, a good man, the kind who'd give you a day's work for nothing and never mention it again.

There’s a particular kind of morning - and if you’re anywhere near sixty, you’ll know the one - when you wake up, and the light through the window curtains is doing something theatrical, the coffee smells like it actually means it, and somewhere ...

There's a particular kind of Irish madness that only reveals itself slowly, like damp coming through a good coat. You don't notice it at first. Everything looks fine. The coat still looks grand.

It's April 10th and the queue at the filling station in Castlebar stretches the length of a bad political career, which is to say, further than anyone wanted to be standing on a wet morning with the rain coming in sideways off Clew Bay.

Radical chic has a uniform and old rockers of a certain vintage will recognise it in the slightly-too-considered dishevelment, the radical politics worn like a vintage jacket.

I am plagued by a question that I keep turning over idly in my mind, a little too obsessively, like a stone in my pocket on a long walk, that I refuse to throw back into the hedgerows until I resolve its attraction.

Every March around St Patrick's Day, we dutifully dispatch the Taoiseach to Washington with a bowl of shamrock and a practised smile. This year, however, he brought six billion dollars and the knowledge of an outrageous war.

Eighty years ago, de Valera beheld a burning Europe and called it a weather event. We're still doing it. We Irish have a distinctive talent for extended euphemism.

The gullible English have always had a weakness for the sort of Irishman who makes them feel both robbed and appreciative of the experience.

There's a particular kind of hell reserved for the man who lives too long. Not a theological hell, though the Catholics of Connemara might have had a view on that.

There's a particularly American bit of research doing the rounds that suggests we're all in the middle of a family relationship crisis. One in four adults is estranged from close relatives, apparently.

I keep thinking about masks. Not the medical kind - though God knows we've had enough of those - but the sort that suggests you've something to hide. The ICE agents currently stalking America's streets wear them constantly.

You know that feeling when you're on a night out and one of the guests whom you've always relied upon, who's perhaps picked up the bill before, who's told great stories, suddenly stands up, begins ranting about buying the neighbour's garden shed, ...

There's a particular quality to silence you only learn when your offspring leaves home. It’s not the absence of noise but the unfamiliar silence that invades when the parenting purpose has been removed.

There's something strangely reassuring about scams. Not the losing-your-life-savings part, but the timeless persistence of deceit.

Imagine a scene in a beige-carpeted office in Belfast, a civil servant clutches her chest and crumples to the floor. Her colleague rushes over.  "What happened?" he gasps.

January usually arrives in the west of Ireland like an uninvited spinster aunt, cold, judgmental, and determined to make you feel terrible about yourself.