Bob Quinn Oscar Wilde said that the tragedy of being old is that one is still young. I am eighty-six, going on nineteen. Is this a record? I’ve been pruning and wood carving with my chainsaw for years. There is no shortage of wood from the trees that I planted thirty years ago. The resultant grotesque heads … Read more
‘Where DID we come from?’ Coincidence? The Sahara was not always a desert. As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle. … Read more
Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he … Read more
I’m of an age to be intrigued by death. My 84-year-old grandmother, widowed, came to live with our family, and took over my bedroom. I was forced to give up the room, to share instead with a sibling. The old woman was hale and hearty, retained her wits, preserved her down to earth assessment of … Read more
Holy Gawd, we’re back to Charles Darwin and his interpreters. In the mid-19th century Darwin was recognised as a superb recorder of natural history and the inventor of evolutionary theory. He pointed to adaptation as a species’ key to survival. If an animal couldn’t adapt to new circumstances it faced extinction – like the dinosaurs … Read more
Years ago, arriving late one evening in Ostende by train – always my favourite means of travel – from Paris, I went to the first hotel I spotted: The OLD SHAKESPEARE HOTEL. I booked a room and, feeling expansive after a film shoot in Sud Tirol, asked the blonde receptionist for directions to the best restaurant in … Read more
Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness – in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black. ‘Oh good’, he … Read more
I first heard the story of Gene Shepherd after receiving a 46th rejection slip for my novel. Shepherd was a New York radio presenter who broadcast regularly for twenty-two years. What interested me about him was that he created a best-selling book which did not exist. Because he thought disc jockeys were just an extension … Read more
Disregarding chronological order, this is the tenth episode of A Monk Manqué, Bob Quinn’s unpublished (unpublishable?) memoir A Monk Manqué, following A Monk Manqué – Prologue A Monk Manqué – Thaura Mornton Making Films Early Days in RTÉ Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi Culchies – An Excerpt from A Monk Manqué Last Days in RTÉ – … Read more
I made the following notes in an old factory that was built in 1906 at a cost of six hundred pounds. It was a draughty one story building which has stood for over a century on the eastern shore of Loch an Mhuilinn in Carraroe, Conamara. Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge referred to … Read more