It’s a good time of the year to be a bearded man. Santa Clauses are in demand, appearing in department stores, at the Zoo, in corporate offices (yes, there are corporate Santas), in grottos, in underground caves ( no really)… I was promised an interview with one of Dublin’s Santa Clauses through a mutual friend, […]

9 years ago

Lock your doors. Hide your kids, hide your wife. Avoid buses, Luases and main roads. Maybe just don’t leave the house at all, because it’s that time of the year when Dublin is overrun with people not from Dublin. Historically, December 8th is the day when people from the country come up to Dublin for […]

9 years ago

For years and years, my table manners were atrocious. My party trick was not eating dinner, pretending to eat or making excuses. At restaurants I always said I’d eaten earlier, or felt sick, or had to leave early. Anything to get out of ordering. If pressed, I would ask for the plainest item on the […]

9 years ago

Stop what you’re doing, this is important. You need to go and see Atom Tick, James Moran and Stephane Bena Hanly’s new show. Except that it’s not a show, exactly. It’s standup comedy, a business pitch, a ‘meditative-type experience’, and a pilot for a TV show which may or may not exist, or will exist […]

9 years ago

Even before Halloween I spotted trucks delivering the Christmas lights to Grafton Street by night. And now they’ve been switched on by Elmo from Love/Hate (an amusingly odd–and dark–choice, in my opinion. Do children like Elmo from Love/Hate? Let’s assume they do…). They hang in glittering clusters above chuggers and the tourists pausing to take […]

9 years ago

I have found my spirit animal. Or perhaps a few spirit animals. Because here at the Dead Zoo, also known as the Natural History Museum, I am like a child in a toy shop. I want to take all the creatures home. We’ll begin with the cheetah, a vampire bat or two and the long-nosed […]

9 years ago

Tonight I am among vampires, drinking coffee in the dark. Ireland didn’t always have a twenty four hour Starbucks. Once, not very long ago, we didn’t have Starbucks at all. But now the future is here–how far we have come!–and I’m sitting in the former headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank at 3am on a Thursday, next […]

9 years ago

We all remember doing stupid things as students. I remember drinking Tesco Value screwdrivers made with Tesco Value Vodka. I remember trying–and failing at–standup comedy. I remember doing morally questionable things in cupboards, at house parties with questionable young men. I also remember spending a lot of time in Wetherspoons. And now, for all my […]

9 years ago

For a year my job was to look at food porn all day. Well, it was a bit more complicated than that. I was the community manager (that is, I ran Facebook and Twitter) for a cheese brand, and would spend my days befriending bored teenagers and their even more bored mothers and posting pictures […]

9 years ago

The 7D cinema seemed to materialise from nowhere, fulfilling a need we never knew we had. That it would just appear one day, that Dublin might be lacking cinema which entertains in not two or even three, but seven dimensions, follows the curious logic of its setting. Capel Street is an alternate dimension all of its […]

9 years ago

The Dundrum Town Centre turns ten years old this week. Weird, right? Doesn’t that make you feel old? Or do you care? Do you even go there anymore? Whether or not you shop there, it’s been an eventful decade at Dundrum. Vacant spaces have filled out with over 100 shops and 34 restaurants. More than […]

9 years ago

I love my parents. I’m just not sure I want to live with them. I write this sitting at a desk in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by trenches of clothing. To one side are the things I wear everyday. On the other are clothes I’ve not worn in years. I’m doing a clean-out, because– for […]

9 years ago

Right you miserable little readers. I bet you thought you were off the hook, now that Dry January is over? But no, your suffering will not cease. Now is the time of bare fridges, the snackless winter of our discontent. I hope you gorged on pancakes yesterday and Instagrammed every lemon and sugar-covered morsel, for […]

9 years ago

If you ever listened to something called blog house, or went to Crawdaddy back in the day, or if you’ve ever had a post-apocalyptic haircut, then today is a sad day. Carles, author of website Hipster Runoff, has auctioned off his blog to an anonymous bidder. Hipster Runoff is dead, and I can’t help but […]

9 years ago

It’s 2pm on a Monday and I’ve just had four shots of whiskey. It was for journalism’s sake, I swear. I’m at the Irish Whiskey Museum, at the end of their forty-five minute tour. After passing through a reconstructed ‘shebeen’ and distillery, a Victorian bar and a recreation of a rural wake, the trail culminates […]

9 years ago

University is where you learn to eat. True, not everyone studies at third level, and many of us learn to cook as teenagers. But it remains a formative period, one where things which were once basic suddenly become challenging without adult help. Like navigating a city by oneself, or putting on clean clothes and getting […]

9 years ago

I don’t mean to alarm you, but there’s a group of covert masochists with a presence in every town, likely near where you live, who meet late at night and in the early morning, dressed in little more than sports bras and spandex shorts. They convene in far-flung suburban studios to practise the most barbaric […]

9 years ago

How many 2015 prediction lists have you read so far? It’s ok, you can tell me. Every year I get through endless repetitions of the same article, to the point where compiling a list of lists begins to seem like a good idea. The best are those articles that are absurdly specific: I find digital […]

9 years ago

There are two Christmas song lyrics which I have an irrational hatred for. One is from Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, in which he claims “The choir of children sing their song/ They practised all year long“. This is patently untrue. Yes, Christmas is a big time for children’s choirs. But so is Easter, and weddings, […]

9 years ago

Are you reading this on the sofa? Have you been on the sofa so long that you are starting to become part of the sofa? Are you in a roast vegetable-induced vegetative state? For many of us this is the lost time of Christmas, the food coma limbo, the mulled wine-fueled timewarp which swallows up […]

9 years ago

I guess my standards for markets are pretty high. Every Saturday for years, my mother and I would wake at 6am and drive to Cumberland Street for their early morning market, where we’d rummage through trenches of clothes and shoes and stacked boxes of fabric detergent which apparently had fallen off a truck. Broken electricals […]

9 years ago