Home now from Ireland, with this marvellous extract from Flann O Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds” that somehow captures my experience of living a week in Ballyvaughn listening to the rush of na Gaeilige spoken from the mouths of scholars and poets and activists and to the floating tunes on the air of the night as I walked home from O Loclainn’s pub with the taste of Green Spot on my lips and my skin kissed by the breeze off the sea. Of the musics you have ever got, asked Conan, which have you found the sweetest ? I will relate, …
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On a bus at the moment travelling from Tartu to Tallinn, through the Estonian countryside. We pass by fields and forests that remind me deeply of the southern Ontario countryside I grew up, differing only in the occasional ruins of old Soviet collectivist farms and apartment blocks that housed their workers when this was part of the Soviet Union. This is my second trip to Estonia and it is perhaps not my last one. There is some much that is interesting about this country and my friends here, including a close connection to land and culture and a strong sense …
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in northern Minnesota, on a lake near Callaway at a strange place called Maplelag Resort with 25 indigenous nation rebuilders…held in a landscape that is turning red as the maples and the oaks show their colours., and reflecting blue in the northern lakes, water pooled on beds of granite, the oldest skin of mother earth…rocks 3 billion years old at our feet and fall coming in…
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Istanbul is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and it’s not surprising why. The city holds so much history of importance to both Europe and Asia that people come from all over to touch it and see it. Although there are lots of Europeans and some North Americans wandering around the Sultanahmet district where we are staying, there are also lots of tourists from Central Asia and Turkey itself visiting during Ramadan. So of course staying in the tourist district it’s hard sometimes to glimpse the important things to local people, but two stood out yesterday. …
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I think it’s fair to say that the expression “I’m writing from a rooftop terrace in the old part of Istanbul” has a certain romantic appeal to it. And this is where I am, having travelled on a short red eye flight from Copenhagen last night, to arrive with my family in a lovely hotel in the centre of Istanbul’s most ancient downtown, in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and with the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in front of me. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and the family are all sleeping. We’ve …