Ireland

In the pitch dark, we stormed from the house to the pick-up truck and screeched out of our farmyard with me shouting: ‘Come on! This is our only chance! If we don’t get there now we’re done for!’ ‘They won’t sell to us because we’re English. It’s like those stories you hear about idiots who move to Wales’ It was nearly 10 p.m. and I had just scored something on the phone so elusive on this remote hillside that I was physically itching from the desperation of trying to get it. The dealer concerned had answered his phone after I had rung him repeatedly, on the hour every hour, like

With families chatting in the seats around me, a young girl knitting across the aisle, I gripped the arm rests. I’m not a good sailor, so as I stared out at a flat calm sea, I went through a version of the same ritual I do when I’m on a plane: I figured that if I never took my eyes off what was beneath me and ahead of me, that would make it safe. I texted the builder boyfriend, a keen yachtsman, to say I did not understand how anyone could go on a cruise. All that sea for miles. What was there to look at? I drove in a

On Remembrance Sunday in Nairobi nearly a decade ago, an ancient Kenyan veteran told Sam Mattock, a British ex-cavalry officer, that he had lost his second world war service medals. Could Sam help replace them? In a culmination of Sam’s personal efforts, King Charles III, on his visit to Kenya with Queen Camilla next week, will present medals to four veterans who fought for the empire in North Africa, Madagascar and Burma. The youngest of them, Kefa Chagira and Ezekiel Anyange, are 99. John Kavai is 101 and the eldest, Samweli Mburia, is 117 and served as a corporal in Burma. One hundred thousand African troops fought the Japanese in

‘You certainly gave us a run for our money,’ said the village elder, serving us with what appeared to be the official goodbye statement. I was sick of that old navy dressing gown myself. Shortly afterwards I got him a new one from Sainsbury’s The builder boyfriend was flabbergasted. He had been walking across the green with the spaniels when this gentleman, a leading light in the community, came towards him. He braced for impact because the last time they engaged outside the house it had not gone well. The builder b had, on that occasion, been wearing his old navy-blue towelling dressing gown and was putting out the bins.

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much

A bay mare was standing over a foal curled up sleeping at her feet. Yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open, she was snoozing herself in the sun-drenched paddock of a small white farmhouse. If I had stopped the car to admire the scene every time the scene was this perfect, then I would not have made a mile’s progress on my third house-hunting trip to Ireland. In the country lanes, drivers slowed and waved to me on every bend. A cyclist put his foot on the ground and grinned as though genuinely pleased to see me. Everyone here has time. That’s how it seems anyway. The shop windows

Why are politicians so incapable of answering basic questions about biology? Yesterday it was Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s turn. A journalist asked him a yes or no question: ‘Do you believe that Barbie Kardashian is a woman?’ Barbie Kardashian, whose birth name was Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile, is a violent man who identifies as a woman. Last week he was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail – a women’s jail – for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother. He is, as the journalist who cornered Varadkar put it, ‘a violent biological male with a penis’. So what was Varadkar’s answer to this easiest of questions? This was a straightforward query

Troubles ahead? Sir: Jenny McCartney’s article ‘Border lines’ (1 October) was a profoundly depressing one. Perhaps there will be a united Ireland within the next 30 years; but will it be a peaceful and happy place? I have my doubts. Might not areas such as overwhelmingly Unionist Antrim, north Down, north Armagh, east Belfast and indeed much of Co. Londonderry become no-go areas for the new Irish governing authorities – rather in the same way as Derry, west Belfast and south Armagh were for the British in the times of the Troubles? Most of the wiser commentators observe that the Good Friday Agreement was only a truce, not a perpetual