My Team / Your Team III

In the final part of his essay on the joys and woes of being an Irish Manchester City fan, Desmond Traynor delves into psychological and emotional reasons for sustaining sporting allegiances, through thick and thin. Even if nothing in the foregoing fact-based rant convinces City-sceptics, it is not the main plank of my justification for … Read more

Lessons from the Great Depression III

Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is … Read more

The Most Natural Thing in the World III

To tell you the truth, I could easily have been a father, and I would be a father now, had my wife J not miscarried a baby we once made. This was in 2002, so he or she would have been eighteen by now. So strange to envisage it: another life – for me, for … Read more