Is your handwriting legible or does it look like the scratchings of a drunken spider dipped in ink? Where you of a generation that learned handwriting in school, both the basic shapes and the fancy cursive ‘joined-up’ handwriting? Perhaps you have a version of dyspraxia which makes the entire process a chore.

I’m a regular journal-writer, and most of my fiction projects begin on the page, so I hand write a great deal. I even correspond via letter with a few pen-pals, although I am behind on that score currently.

A few months ago when reading one of my journals, I ended up squinting at several words to try and understand the scrawl. Some of this is simply the result of rushing. My thoughts are not lackadaisical, and I have a tendency to dash after them with my pen, afraid I will not keep up.

Since September last year I’ve been drawing and painting on a more regular basis. Once you return to a practice after a long absence you are immediately struck by the atrophy of ability. Most people are familiar with the adage, ‘use it or lose it’, but Leonard da Vinci had a more evocative description:

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.1

But there is also a depreciation that occurs through a lack of care. I decided to begin remediation by writing letter drills every day. I fished out a bullet journal from my stack, and began to write each letter in a line across the page.

Wow, did my brain buck at this! The neural pathways for writing have been set since childhood, and while some of them may have been tweaked along the way, my brain has been super satisfied with the craftsmanship of those skill corridors. It likes nothing better than familiar, smooth connections that don’t require surplus energy to engage. I imagined a supervisor in a hard hat, hands behind its back, whistling contently as it passed the old routes. ‘They knew how to build back then, when everything was fresh and pliable.’

The contractor’s job had been certified and it had moved on decades ago to newer, more pressing tasks such as digging up the doom-scrolling habit (a budget-busting project).

Suddenly, I was walking along those ancient pathways, kicking at their brickwork with a vexed expression, and provoking consternation by my neural-supervisor. This was objectively unnecessary!

There’s an odd sensation that occurs when you attempt to rejig such an assimilated ability. Occasionally you have weird tics and your pen makes quirky movements. You question your ability to write at all. You notice how an r, u and a v can look identical if you don’t focus on refinement. Sometimes you get into a rhythm and you forget when to end an m and it gains an extra arch (also known as a ‘hump’).

I wasn’t attempting to stretch into calligraphy… yet. When I studied Art in secondary school I specialised in calligraphy for my Leaving Cert, and it is the Imperatrix of handwriting. The neural tracks for those precise movements had been repurposed long ago, probably during the white heat of crisis when I learned to drive and all resources were gobbled to create a bicameral geography.

The fastest way to improve is simple: slow down and repeat. That’s all it takes. In the beginning I fell into my typical impatient move of ‘just get it done’. After a few days I recognised my error and decided to focus on the pleasure of the well-formed o and the lovely l loop.

After a week I saw improvement. That neural-supervisor had complained and protested but eventually it recalled the contractor, who was astonished at this revision— it was all rather fundamental; and the contractor loved it.

This is the nuts and bolts of being human: engaging in making. Even something as simple as a line of text.

Before I embarked upon this handwriting revision I stumbled upon the Sailor Fude de Mannen fountain pen with a 55°angle nib2, thanks to my love affair with watercolours. 3

Galway-based Watercolourist and Urban Sketcher expert, Róisín Curé, is a fan of these inexpensive Japanese fountain pens (you can get them in a variety of angled nibs). I know Róisín from the Irish comic book scene4, and I had followed her work over the years, especially her YouTube channel which took off in the post-Covid world.

Through Róisín I discovered both the Fude pen and the German Ink company, De Atramentis, which produces a colourful range of Document Inks. What is a Document Ink? It’s lightfast, waterproof, acid-free, and fast drying, so it is an archival standard ink that’s designed to prevent document fraud (it resists chemical alteration, washing, and unauthorised duplication).

It might be surprising that I’ve avoided sinking into the fountain pen and ink obsession… many, many of my writer friends are deep in that passion pit. Although I’ve become a fan of the Fude fountain pen and this brand of ink, I have not allowed my interest to slip into the splurge territory. I simply do not have the funds to become a fountain pen fancier!

My main appreciation for the Fude is the ability to create three different lines of thickness from the one nib.

To get that thin line I write with the fountain pen upside down, and yet it’s a smooth experience. The versatility of line from one fountain pen is extremely handy. It’s particularly useful if you want to draw en plein air (‘in the open air’). If you use Document Ink for outlines you can paint watercolours over it with no fear of smudging.

Now I look forward to my daily writing drills. I’ve also added in drawing basic shapes (circles, hatching, squares, spirals) to regain finer motor control for line work, and I’m slowly branching into foreign alphabets.

There is a meditative quality to this practice — it encourages a loose attentiveness at its best moments. I’m hardly inventing anything new! In Japanese Zen, ensō (“circular form”) is a circle painted with one brushstroke and using a single breath. Finding that artful, perfectly imperfect circle is the result of years of practice and millions of attempts. The neural pathways do not become lazy. They are encouraged and kept active with kind repetition and care.

In the moment of creation the painter, the brush, and the paper become one.

I’m not yet at this peak!

On Monday I received a package from PS Publishing with the signing sheets for the limited edition hardback of my forthcoming novella, House of Wyrd (available for pre-order).

The artwork is part of the endpapers that my cover artist, , designed for the volume. The main character of the story is called Pallas — after Pallas Athena — which explains the the iconography in this image. What a delight to open the box and to see Lisa’s work given an extra boost.

I’ve signed signing sheets for books before, but it’s the first time since I’ve been practising writing in a more conscious fashion.

The Tarot feature strongly in this book, so I picked out a selection of pals for the photo op to mark the moment. Then I loaded up the Sepia Brown in my fountain pen and began signing my name.

The house was quiet, and through the open window the birds chirped and rustled across branches. I wrote my name and considered the people who would buy this book, open the cover and see my signature. I thought about the team who have invested so much effort to create this volume.

As I wrote my name over and over, I thanked all future readers, and I hoped some magic of this making would be imbued in the book.

I thought of the entire process: from the first nebulous idea, to short pitch, then the words on the page, as well as the edit, the art, the layout, the paper printing, the binding, and the final rollout of the copies (hardback and paperback). All these elements are drawn together to launch an imagined world to an audience.

As my pen looped my name and I moved paper from one pile to another, I remained in a period of meditative appreciation.

What a gift! Thank you!

Here’s a brief blurb about the book:

Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and magician, is missing on the eve of the opening of her visionary project, the Path of Illumination. It falls to her estranged daughter, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, to navigate through dream, memory and arcane mystery to revisit her history
with her mother in ’80s London and ’90s Ireland until Pallas catches up with present-day revelation by walking the road to enlightenment designed by her mother.

Pre-order the special edition here!

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4

Róisín has just published a beautiful, small comic called Wild Atlantic Ink, a charming selection of thoughts, stories, and art tips!

Last week’s cannibal CME did not produce much of an effect, sadly. It’s not a good time of the year for aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere, with longer days and the axial tilt of the Earth nodding towards the sun. As I type there’s another CME due to impact the planet’s magnetosphere, but I suspect it will be another poor showing.

Yet, if you enjoy star gazing then there is a fabulous conjunction visible in the heavens at the moment between Jupiter and Venus, with Mercury dodging about lower in the sky. This feels like a happy June event, considering this is the traditional month for weddings, and these three planets are associated with parties, beauty, and magic.

It’s hard to believe the summer solstice is approaching, especially as we’ve had a mixed bag weather-wise in the West of Ireland. Last week we had tempestuous winds and chilly temperatures, making it feel more like Spring than Summer.

During this time I took a course in the Burren in Co. Clare (a county to the south of me). It possesses a unique, moody landscape on the Wild Atlantic Way, the appropriate description for Ireland’s western coastline. I had a forty-minute drive through roads snaking up and between the lavender mounds of the Burren mountains, often drenched in mist and rain, and sometimes illuminated with roving columns of sunlight.

The Wild Atlantic Way officially begins up north at the Inishowen Peninsula in Co. Donegal and meanders through counties Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Limerick and Kerry, to finish in Kinsale, County Cork. 3,320 km of Atlantic Ocean separates this edge of Ireland from the coast of Canada and the USA.

Thanks to the West’s squiggly outline, the Wild Atlantic Way route is over 2,600 km long! Not bad for an island that’s only 480 km north-south, and 275 km east-west (the entire coastline of the country is about 7,500 km).

If you are a geology nerd you may know that the edge of Ireland and Scotland used to be part of the Appalachian Mountain system now in North America, before plate tectonics ripped apart our planet’s original supercontinent. The oldest rocks in Ireland are 1.7 billion years old, from the Precambrian era, which are evident in the North West of Ireland. As a result, geological formations in Donegal are the same as in Newfoundland.

So it’s quite curious that there were specific waves of emigration from Ireland to Newfoundland prior to 1815, and primarily from the Southern counties of Waterford, Tipperary and Cork. The subsequent influence on the Newfoundland accent and placenames is striking. Newfoundland and Ireland have a social and a geological connection.

Most people are familiar with the American Appalachian Trail, which is a 3,500 km journey (similar to the width of the Atlantic Ocean) between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. Every year up to three million people attempt to walk sections of this historic route, and anyone attempting a thru-hike1 of the entire trail needs to set aside at least six months. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) estimates that around 4,000 people attempt a thru-hike every year but only about 20-25% actually finish it.

Because of the geological resonance between the separated territories of Ireland and Appalachia, a tourist imitative was set up called the International Appalachian Trail (IAT), which encourages long-distance walkers to follow the geographic frequency by flying over the Atlantic and continuing to walk through Donegal and Northern Ireland.

Of course this map is not to scale, as I’m pretty sure that Ireland is not the equivalent length of France!

This reminds me of a famous adage by semantics expert, Alfred Korzybski: ‘The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...’2

This has also been stated as ‘the model is not the data’, or my favourite version, because it is the easiest to digest, by philosopher Alan Watts: “The menu is not the meal.”

A map is a projection, because we live in a three-dimensional space upon a spinning globe orbiting the sun, and our solar system is moving around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Trying to render that spatial existence as a two-dimensional map means that distortions are inevitable. We draw a map, draft a menu, or paint a pipe knowing that these are poor facsimiles of a system in motion yet we attempt it anyway, hoping to approximate the experience, to offer a bridge across disconnection into understanding.

So we come to the difficulty of the on-going use of the 1569 World Map created by Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish geographer and cartographer. To be fair to Mercator, this map was an extraordinary achievement for the time period, and was particularly useful for navigation, the great problem of the ship-faring era.

To traverse the unknown people had to flatten the space and create guidelines. Over time, that shortcut determined the shape of the world.

The Mercator Map has embedded itself in the minds of most of the global population, and we are left with a wonky notion of the physical presence of our land masses.

Yet isn’t that the problem of theory versus experience? It is the difference between studying a location and travelling through its landscape. No picture of a forest adequately expresses the majesty of its living, evolving ecosystem.

Why would anyone go anywhere today? Right now we can fire up our favourite travel app, drop into ‘street view’, and explore a place from the comfort of our sitting room.

This is the age of mapping. It is easy to believe in the grids and lines, the certainty of GPS coverage and AI navigators, forgetting it has only ever been a model, and it can be reframed.

It is extremely useful to be able to chart a course with a reasonable expectation that it will bring us to our destination, but signals drop, road works re-route us, or train strikes mess up our plans.

We can clutch our maps and our schedules and wonder why it is going awry… but it was never guaranteed, we simply imagined a structure and expected the world to conform.

The map is not the territory, and the territory has a say.

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Older subscribers might remember a post I made back in May 2024 alerting people to a cannibal CME approaching the Earth, and that evening we had the most extraordinary northern lights, which were observed across the globe at unexpected latitudes.

For newer readers, a CME is a Coronal Mass Ejection — the magnetised plasma that sometimes accompanies a solar flare. These energies are blasted in whatever direction the sunspot is facing at that time and are carried by the solar winds, so the Earth isn’t always in their path.

Today it is.

Sunspot 4455 pulsed a series of flares yesterday at various times.

This sunspot is an unusual anti-Hale variety, which means it has a volatile reversed-polarity magnetic field. This graph from SpaceWeather.com shows yesterday’s burst.

A Cannibal CME forms when fast-moving CMEs overtake slower CMEs in front of them, so the CMEs merge and arrive with extra punch. NOAA Space Weather Predictor has a handy animated image to demonstrate the effect.

NOAA’s most recent prediction is:

‘The current forecast calls for combined CME arrival around mid-afternoon EDT of June 4, with up to G3 levels possible afterwards. CME passage would likely continue into the evening and possibly overnight hours of June 5.’

Your ability to see this depends upon your location, and cloud cover. At the moment the West of Ireland is experiencing wild, wet, and windy conditions, so we’ll be dependent upon the whims of our eccentric weather for gaps in the cloud cover.

Spaceweather.com is always a good channel to watch if you want to keep updated on this situation. Sunspot 4455 may not be finished flaring, so this could go on for a while yet.

If you can, watch the skies tonight!

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Thank you for the kind comments about my forthcoming novella, House of Wyrd, from PS Publishing, and especially your praise for the striking cover artwork by . Cheers to those of you who have already ordered the hardcopy edition!

It is tropical in Ireland at the moment. To step outside in the afternoon is to feel the instant scald of the sun.

Everywhere, flowers erupt in colourful songs of praise at summer’s arrival. Butterflies flicker through the puzzle shapes of tree-shade and bees dance on petals with their fat pollen-socks. Birds sing from their sheltered perches. Reduced rivers burble greetings to panting dogs, who slip leads to splash in the cooling water.

Optimism soars. Smiles beam on flushed faces as people greet strangers with solar-powered enthusiasm. The warbled call of ice cream trucks echoes through street-valleys, summoning clamouring children and their supervising adults, jangling coins and cards. People plop down on park lawns to lick cones, eat sandwiches and sip drinks— the best of them take away their litter…

Drowsiness creeps up during the post-lunch swelter.

Those who experience warm climates understand that the only way to survive is to live with a gap in the centre of the day where you retreat to canopied spaces and reduce activity. They embrace fresh mornings and balmy evenings. Yet, the rigid disciplinarians controlling modern lifestyles disdain siestas or piecemeal days and insist people stick to standard hours from season to season. Not everyone benefits from air-conditioned workplaces or homes designed to cope with blistering heat.

No doubt, if you wish to obtain services in the middle of the day a retreat is an irritant, but less so when you bend to the situation rather than rail at its awkwardness for your schedule. We chain other people to their desks and registers because we insist on constant supply and no inconvenience. We expect service with a smile from those who are operating in extra-hot kitchens, stifling offices, or those occupied outside.

Summer holidays must be optimised with hourly highlights so we can record our fun and prove it happened. What memories can we photograph if they consist of a quiet snooze by a haystack? Van Gogh painted it; an admiration of the glory of a nap in between hard work.

To stop for the scorch is sensible, but only if it doesn’t impact what I plan to do. In a me-centric world, it’s hard to loosen ego’s reins and soften the insistent schedule in our brains.

Anyone who is in a rush or stressed feel the penalty of extra heat. This is weather that demands we lighten the load, but a slow-down is difficult for people in demanding careers or responsible for the care of others, especially those locked into travel by cars or public transport that snarl through busy roads bent by heat mirages. Our good will melts incrementally with every rising degree.

Tempers may soar with the temperatures.

And I arrive at the interesting nexus of nouns and verbs that originate from temper: to temper, a temper, temperament, temperature, temperance, tempo…

It is likely a development from the Old English temprian “to mix with, moderate,” which originates from the Latin temperāre "to exercise moderation, restrain oneself, moderate,” but also there is a sense of the Latin tempor-, tempus “time, period of time, season.”

So to temper a spice in the pan or a blade on an anvil is to introduce heat to help modify or change its state.1 A (bad) temper is to lose balance and restraint. A temperament is a mixture of elements that make up the personality, and those qualities can go askew.2 Temperature is a measure of heat based on various scales. Temperance requires moderation, to restrict a habit. Tempo is a beat, the pace of music. It is about having a rhythm, and understanding how to play within that speed.

The composition suggests the pace.

Did you know that there is an opposite instinct to hibernation, known as aestivation (‘summer sleep)? It’s a dormancy in animals that is triggered by higher temperatures and dry conditions.

For instance, in a drought crocodiles burrow into the mud of riverbeds with just eyes and nostrils exposed so they can see and breathe. Their heart beats three times a minute and they only have to breathe once every five minutes. In this dormant state they can survive until the rainy season returns. Clearly a working tactic for an animal that appeared roughly 83 million years ago and continues to survive.

Another weird fact about crocs is that they can sleep with one eye open because, unlike humans, their brain allows for ‘unihemispheric sleep’ — an ability shared by other aquatic creatures such as dolphins and orcas as well as birds.3 This gives crocodiles a quick advantage if attacked by a predator, or if an opportunistic snack wanders too close…

The summer slumber of a croc does not mean they are vulnerable. They have hunkered into shelter, listening to an ancient instinct to endure until the next cycle.

They know when to rest, and when to snap awake and charge.

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Happy Friday and I’ve got news!

I am so pleased that my forthcoming novella, House of Wyrd, will be published by PS Publishing, as part of their Absinthe Imprint, which is overseen by Managing Editor, Marie O’Regan.

Talented artist created the terrific cover artwork - check it out!

It’s been a marvellous team effort, and my thanks to all concerned!

Cheers also to Mike Carey, Alison Littlewood, Lisa Tuttle and Priya Sharma for their blurbs for the book!

The limited edition, signed hardback will be released first, and you can pre-order it now. Lisa also designed beautiful endpapers for this volume.

It is an occult mystery with plenty of action and magic, and here’s a tiny summary:

‘Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and magician, is missing on the eve of the opening of her visionary project, the Path of Illumination. It falls to her estranged daughter, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, to navigate through dream, memory and arcane mystery to revisit her history with her mother in ’80s London and ’90s Ireland until Pallas catches up with present-day revelation by walking the road to enlightenment designed by her mother.’

The Blurbs:

“Poignant, wry and compelling. McHugh’s tale of family crises and arcane mysteries brings the magic.”

—M.R. Carey (Outlaw Planet, Infinity Gate)

“A colourful, mysterious Tarot-infused occult adventure, so vividly written that reading it was like having a weird and wonderful dream. It features two great characters: Aly, the “art-monster” single mother and her conflicted adult daughter Pallas—and now I wish for more stories about them.”

—Lisa Tuttle (The Mysteries, A Nest of Nightmares)

“Beautifully realised characters, a dark and magical quest at its heart and prose that’s a sheer delight—Maura McHugh’s latest novella is a joy to read.”

—Alison Littlewood (Path of Needles, The Crow Garden)

“House of Wyrd demonstrates what a versatile and erudite writer Maura McHugh is. I devoured in one sitting.”

Priya Sharma (Pomegranates, Ormeshadow)

I’ve always struggled to promote myself, especially in our current world where we are pinged constantly with notifications across multiple platforms. Often it seems like all efforts by the indie author are lost in the bombastic noise.

Yet I love this work and I feel if I can’t promote it on my behalf, then I must do so for everyone else who has given it such hard graft and loving attention.

It reminds me again how every artwork requires a group of people to birth it. I’m very glad for my midwives! So, you can expect that I will have to mention this more than once.

If you can’t pre-order the hardback, then the paperback will appear in the future, and you will be informed about that event via this newsletter.

It’s rare that I focus a newsletter solely on one of my projects, but today it’s only House of Wyrd.

Enjoy the weekend — it looks like the weather is going to improve here in Ireland. Bring on the sun!

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I skipped a newsletter last week — a rare occurrence — because another creative project hijacked my mind-space. I re-routed my neuro-GPS and have returned.

For a long time I’ve been pondering the dilemma of creative innovation. What circumstances provoke it? How can you facilitate it? Why switch tracks if the trolley is not rushing towards a conundrum?

Because nobody likes eating stale crackers.

Sure, if nothing else exists in the cupboard and you’re desperate for food, stale crackers lend the illusion of nourishment.

Crunch, crunch, crunch. Sip water to wash the gravel and dust down your throat to form a heavy paste in your gut. It fills you down.

An hour later your head is stuck in the most awkward cabinet, pushing aside boxes of out-of-date multiseed flatbreads, with an unfilled need yearning for its dream match.

Strangely, in our world of miracles dry crackers are plentiful.

Udo Keppler (1872 – 1956) was an American political cartoonist and publisher, and the son of Joseph Keppler (1872–1956), who was one of the co-creators of the humour magazine Puck (1876 - 1918).

The above cartoon, drawn in 1909 by Udo, ‘…shows a well-dressed man labeled “Plutocracy”, wearing a top hat, holding a parrot labeled “State Legislature” on his right hand, trying to get it to repeat a phrase after him, “We don't want an Income-Tax Amendment!”, and promising it “some nice crackers” in return for correctly learning to repeat the phrase.’

I rifle through online art catalogues a great deal, and I’m often struck by how the themes of previous generations contain a remarkable resonance to our current age.

If the parrot repeats the phrase it earns a cracker, but remains in the cage. The plutocrat eats well at the head table, served by the help.

This 7th of January 1885 cover of Puck was drawn by Joseph Keppler and depicts a doctor and a sexton (in charge of digging graves) greeting each other over a pretty stick of candy. This was an era when children’s sweets were polluted with dangerous chemicals because pretty treats were a more attractive and commercial product, thus fattening the coffers of the owners of factories producing mass-manufactured confections.

The artist did his homework. Each of the candy stick’s colored bands carries the name of an adulterant or food dye that matches its color in the lithograph. At the top is a green band for chrome green (chromium oxide), next a white one for chalk, then red for red lead (lead oxide). Below are white for arsenic (arsenic trioxide), yellow for chrome yellow (lead chromate), red for vermilion (mercury sulfide), white for arsenic again, then green for verdigris (copper acetate). At the bottom is a white band for glucose (used as an adulterant for sugar and sometimes containing acidic residue from its manufacturing process). All these ingredients were unregulated and readily accessible in apothecary shops and pigment stores and from wholesale sources.

The 19th century saw explosive growth in the number of chemists and in chemical knowledge, including improved understanding of metallic elements and the dangerous dyes made from their compounds. But in a country of small-government ideology and laissez-faire attitudes in commerce, little was accomplished to protect the public despite agitation by journalists, cartoonists, physicians, and scientists. Around the turn of the century the Progressive movement’s muckraking investigations included larger and more frequent exposures of defective food products. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book about the meatpacking industry, The Jungle1, is the most prominent example of many calls to arms. Just months after his book was published, Congress passed the nation’s first Pure Food and Drug Act, which closed one era of food safety advocacy and opened another.2

Sweets do little to counteract true hunger, although they are momentarily delicious.

One of the first texts to tackle the issue of food contaminants was A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820) by Frederick Accum, a German chemist who established his career in London.

He added a quick synopsis on the front page, above the skull-topped dual-serpent urn, which promised that it was ‘A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons. Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy. And Methods of Detecting Them.”

Here are a few examples of the food cheats he discovered:

By this time tea and coffee drinking had become popular in England but, being imported, both were expensive and as the fashion spread cheaper varieties were needed for sale to the masses. Many of these were not genuine tea and coffee but were made to look like the real thing by chemical treatment. Spent tea leaves and coffee grounds could be bought for a few pence per pound from London hotels and coffee shops. The used tea leaves were boiled with copperas (ferrous sulphate) and sheep's dung, then coloured with prussian blue (ferric ferrocyanide), verdigris (basic copper acetate), logwood, tannin or carbon black, before being resold. Some varieties of cheap teas contained or were made entirely from the dried leaves of other plants. Exhausted coffee grounds were treated in a similar way, adulterated with other roasted beans, sand/gravel, and mixed with chicory, the dried root of wild endive, a plant of the dandelion family. Chicory itself was sometimes adulterated with roasted carrots or turnips and the dark brown coffee colour was achieved by using 'black jack' (burnt sugar).3

Accum’s book angered a great deal of powerful people. The following year he was accused of tearing out pages of books he was studying in the library of the Royal Institution, and charges were levelled against him. With his reputation in tatters, Accum scarpered to Germany to avoid a trial, and the food fraud continued.

Accum wasn’t the first person to ring the alarm about fake foodstuffs. One of the staples of the human diet — bread — had become a source of concern by the 18th century once cities began to increase in size rapidly. The concentration of people lead to high demand and bakeries struggled to match it, and especially the prestige item: white soft bread.

By 1757 an act of parliament called the ‘Making of Bread Act’ was designed to protect the public health from additives, since it was discovered that bakers were covertly adding alum, chalk or powdered bones to whiten their dough, as well as other ‘ingredients’ such as plaster of Paris, pipe clay or sawdust which would add weight to loaves.

Bakers laboured and sweated for long hours in hot, unhygienic conditions, which affected the quality of the bread, plus the workers were likely to contract ‘baker’s lung, an asthmatic condition that reduced the lifespan of those afflicted, particularly for those living in cities beset with smog. It’s a handy reminder of the toil of yesteryear, and how some automation has wrought useful changes.

It wasn’t until the mid 19th century, a Scottish medical student with a chemistry background, John Dauglish, put together a system of leavening bread with carbon dioxide using machine-assisted production. His Aerated Bread Company (ABC) produced cheaper, uniform bread faster than ever before in a safe environment. Daughlish’s methods were adopted around the world.

Doughlish died at age 42, and did not witness the incredible effect his company would have upon society. It launched the ABC tea rooms (or ABC shops), which offered a cheap menu of tea, sandwiches, and cakes, becoming an international franchise across the UK, America and Australia.

Importantly, ABC tea rooms were one of the first public places Victorian women could go alone or to socialise with other women. This was in large part because of their status as ‘temperance refreshment rooms’, with no alcohol being served. By creating a respectable public forum where women could gather, ABC tea rooms became crucial meeting places for both Suffragists and their violent counterparts, the Suffragettes. This led Margery Corbett Ashby, suffragist and Liberal politician, to call the advent of the ABC shops ‘an enormous move to freedom’. The printed event programme created for the International Council of Women’s Congress held in London in 1899, specifically recommends ABC shops to visiting delegates.4

ABC tea shops were once so commonplace they appeared in contemporary poems, literature, letters and satirical essays.

While A. A. Milne was an editor of the humour journal Punch, he produced a collection of essays called Not That It Matters (1919). One piece called “The Diary Habit”, suggests a fun way to record your everyday adventures, and contains a passing reference to an ABC.

TUESDAY.—”Letter from solicitor informing me that I have come into £1,000,000 through the will of an Australian gold-digger named Tomkins. On referring to my diary I find that I saved his life two years ago by plunging into the Serpentine. This is very gratifying. Was late at the office as I had to look in at the Palace on the way, in order to get knighted, but managed to get a good deal of work done before I was interrupted by a madman with a razor, who demanded £100. Shot him after a desperate struggle. Tea at an ABC, where I met the Duke of —. Fell into the Thames on my way home, but swam ashore without difficulty.”

While reading this I am reminded of phishing scams, YouTube videos and Instagram Reels of go-getters lauding productivity hacks, describing schedules for maxxing wellness, rules for galvanising brainstorming sessions, and the humble reminder to close out the day with gratitude circles at the blessed homestead.

Milne was anticipating the future through observation of his present.

He later adds in his charming essay:

Yes; I suspect that a good many diaries record adventures of the mind and soul for lack of stirring adventures to the body. If they cannot say, “Attacked by a lion in Bond Street to-day,” they can at least say, “Attacked by doubt in St. Paul’s Cathedral.” Most people will prefer, in the absence of the lion, to say nothing, or nothing more important than “Attacked by the hairdresser with a hard brush”; but there are others who must get pen to paper somehow, and who find that only in regard to their emotions have they anything unique to say.

Milne, you wound me!

Too much navel-gazing only uncovers fluff.

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As the 1st of May approaches in the West of Ireland we are experiencing warm, balmy weather and longer days which results in green growth spurts, frothing blossoms upon every bough, and glorious birdsong during dawn and dusk.

Today I spied a Song Thrush sunbathing on a earthenware pot that has not yet been replanted.

The bird fluffed out its fathers and rested on soil warmed by the noon sun, with wings slightly spread, tail fanned, and its head arched with beak slightly open in what looked like a posture of ecstatic enjoyment. After a period of time it hopped up and ducked into the shadow of my car — clearly it reached its heat limits. It returned about twenty minutes later to repeat this process. Birds are inherently cautious, and remaining quiet and open in a clear space means it trusts the location. It felt like an accolade.

This behaviour is referred to as ‘sunning’, and many varieties of birds have been recorded doing it. Research points to this being a system to control pests such as lice which live in the feathers and skin of birds, and ‘that short bursts of sunlight can work as a non-chemical pesticide’.1

For most of my life I’ve experienced lively dreaming states at night, and I go through periods of dedicatedly recording them in journals. I rarely repeat them to people because one’s dream symbology is personal, and as artefacts of the unconscious mind they are rarely ‘rational’, but operate with a metaphorical language that requires consideration and and a certain amount of deciphering.

It’s difficult to invite a stranger into your imaginal landscape and expect them to understand the codes and idiosyncratic trappings. Yet, the feeling of these dreams may be imparted in art, cinema, or music, and many successful creatives have done so in the past — such as in the artworks I’ve mentioned over the years in this newsletter.

Generally, I categorise dreams into three loose headings:

• figuring things out

• intel from below

• big dreams

One classic example of ‘figuring things out’ are stress dreams, which are more direct and usually tackle an obvious problem. This is your mind trying to highlight solutions but sometimes by offering nightmarish exaggerations. On other occasions it can show you an option that your linear thinking never considered. The more we obsess over a topic, especially if we stress our nervous system about it, the more our unconscious tries to alert us to this problem. It can result in a challenging feedback loop if we don’t address the agitating factors.

Most of us hope for rest when we manage to drift off to sleep so distressing dreams are rarely welcome. Yet, consider this mechanism as an attentive friend who speaks a foreign language but who only wishes to aid you in resolving your issues. And of course dreams can be fun and playful too!

‘Intel from below’ is often strange combinations of people, symbols, or locations you’ve experienced but with weird perspectives and distortions. Your primary school now had extra stories or sub-basements, unusual portals and the addition of odd characters. Mythological creatures can take you on journeys to new places and give you gifts or help you figure out puzzles. Sometimes you meet deceased friends, relatives or strangers who you somehow know intimately. Television characters are your buddies and tell you stories. This is where you can obtain insights to health conditions, creative inspiration, or thorny interpersonal challenges. It’s a reminder that your deep mind has answers to questions that might seem intractable, but once you learn to petition for that information it can be forthcoming but dressed up as a mysterious production.

Finally, ‘Big Dreams’ are always signaled by their conviction or tone. They whisk you off to what feels like other dimensions, they can be as real as your waking life, and they have the majesty of a full symphonic orchestra. These dreams can change your life. They might herald a shift in your circumstances, offer an astonishing epiphany, or contain a galvanising call to action. You may wake from it startled, certain of pressing importance of this unearthly communication, but quite soon its intensity dissolves as daily life presses upon you. It can be easy to label such visions as delusion, especially on telling them to an untuned ear.

And sometimes dreams are the garbled noise of a restless mind. Only experience teaches the dreamer what signal requires investigation.

Many people experience ‘liminal dreaming’, which is the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and deep sleep. This can induce sounds, flurries of images and scenarios as you’re drifting toward slumber (or daydreaming), and sometimes its impact can abruptly surface you from your sleep dive. For a long time I was unsure why this happened to me since the standard opinion was that dreams only occurred in the REM state, which is the last phase of a 60-90 minute cycle. We can experience 4-6 cycles a night if we’re doing well, and we’re more likely to remember dreams from the final morning cycle. It’s only in the last few decades that researchers have inched towards a better understanding of the dream spectrum.2

For instance, it’s known now that during REM the channels in our brain open up like petals at dawn to allow the cerebrospinal fluid to flush through and remove any cellular waste. The REM state is essential for good brain health.3

The thrush spreads its feathers in the heat to rid itself of unwanted pests.

In a dream a few weeks ago a distinct voice stated, ‘Beauty is Transmission’, with a tone of iron-clad confidence. This phrase has been percolating in my mind ever since.

I could have omitted this arrived to me in a dream. It would be easier to write that I arrived at this statement from the pondering of my waking mind, but that felt disingenuous.

After all, this phrase is inherently about transmission, and as Marshall McLuhan succinctly stated, ‘The medium is the message’.

Turning this phrase over and over in my mind I have considered the notion of beauty itself, what that means, and how it changes from person to person, culture to culture, and era to era. Piercings, costumes, tattoos, physical shapes, songs, art, films, ceramics, books, hair styles, jewellery, houses, gardens transmit information.

Beauty pulls our attention and sparks engagement. We may even become transfixed, lost in the pleasure of its form.

Since we are experiencing the season of blossoms in Ireland, I kept returning to the life cycle of plants and trees, and how the flower, with its array of enticements, draws insects to its trove of pollen and nectar. The brief beauty of the flower transmits its need and it pulls those who are matched to that desire. In this case it results in a mutual exchange: fertilisation for the plant and food for the bee and her hive. Life moves towards fruiting, decay and renewal because of beauty.

Creatures have learned to replicate that beauty to draw in prey. For instance, there are several varieties of flower mantis, a carnivorous tropical insect that mimics parts of the orchid flower so it can catch and eat unsuspecting pollinating insects. Its beauty is a signal of deceit.

Our mythologies are replete with warning tales of gorgeous people who brought ruin upon their admirers. Beauty is not inherently good or bad, but its ability to mesmerise can make it a powerful force.

Beauty can attract destruction. Its transmission may rankle a mismatched audience. Places of great beauty have been razed to demonstrate superiority. Yet legendary beauty remains with us, imprinted upon the shared human imagination, so we re-create it in different forms. So many artworks have been devoted to imagining scenes, places, people of dazzling beauty that have passed from our reality. They linger with us, coming to us in dreams and visions, transmitting their message to new people, and exciting the imagination or a fresh generation. Great films are remade, musicals and plays are reimagined for a different era, books are adapted into new forms, songs riff on older music, and sequels abound across media. Yet it is the original that generally vibrates with the strongest transmission.

As a student of history I’ve always been struck by the ingrained need in humans for beauty. Our earliest ancestors wanted amber bead necklaces, artfully stitched clothing, stylised tattoos, carved utensils, stone statues, and they collectively constructed monumental resting places for the dead adorned with their symbols. None of it was necessary for survival yet clearly it was highly valued. Beauty carries a transcendent quality, an aura of sublime connection; even those with restricted circumstances crave a sunset, a good tune, or a smile.

Living without beauty is impossible in any age. Around 50,000 BCE (or earlier) the first people crawled into pitch-black caves and painted their cosmologies, stars, animals, and representations of their lives upon the walls. Following generations buried their dead carefully wrapped, anointed in perfume, wreathed in flowers, and surrounded by exquisite goods. Beauty demonstrated honour, duty, tenderness, status, and impact. These objects were so precious, so alive with meaning, it was believed they could transit to the otherworld to accompany the souls of the deceased.

Despite being so distant from these people’s ways of living we can regard their ornaments and be moved by their beauty.

We may not understand the language of every transmission, but we sense the power of its emanation.

Why did my dream send me this message right now? Perhaps it’s a reminder of that need to create and be receptive. Transmission is a two-way process. We observe beauty and recognise it because of a corresponding soul-pull. External beauty calls to the beauty residing within.

Perhaps I need to rest in the sun and open my channels a bit more.

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At the weekend I had the good fortune to attend the National Gallery of Ireland’s latest special exhibition, William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy.

William Blake, a visionary artist and poet, was a defining force in Romanticism. His imaginative and unconventional works continue to inspire today. This exhibition, curated by Tate in partnership with the National Gallery of Ireland, presents a selection of Blake’s most iconic works of art, alongside paintings and drawings by his contemporaries.

Blake’s world was one of fantasy, imagination, and the ancient past, filled with fantastical creatures and visions of the underworld, expressed through a wide variety of media. By placing him in context - among the artists he admired and those he inspired - the exhibition offers insight into an era of extraordinary originality and innovation in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century art. Featuring over 100 works, including by James Barry (1741–1806), Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779), Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827), and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the show explores how artists responded to a time of revolution and transformation, pushing the boundaries of their art into new imaginative territories.

I loved the exhibition, with the paintings and illustrations spotlit in dark rooms and grouped into loose themes (Horror and Peril, Fantastical Creatures, Enchantments, The Gothic, Romanticising the Past, and The Underworld). The modest size of many of his most famous pieces is a surprise, yet their impact is much bigger. Stepping inside the first room is to enter a Platonic cave of dreamy projections by artists dead for hundreds of years but whose work continues to provoke admiration and consideration. I was thrilled to see works by Henry Fuseli and Henry Singleton which I had featured in my newsletter, ‘On the Bat’s Back’ in December.

Being able to view the large, gorgeous canvas by Singleton — ‘Ariel on a Bat’s Back’—made me fall in love with the picture even more. I adore that funny, delightful bat, which also complements Blake’s weird flying-fellow in the above illustration.

In Singleton’s painting Ariel possesses an unearthly luminosity, and his billowing scarf conveys flow. His eyes are almost Manga-large, a herald of a future style. I am often amazed at the capacity of artists to capture action in a still image, an incredible contradiction; finesse defying form.

Several of the monumental works in the exhibition by Edward Dayes — ‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’ (1798)—Philip James de Loutherbourg — ‘An Avalanche in the Alps’ (1803)—Samuel Colman— ‘The Destruction of the Temple’ (c. 1840-1850)—and William Westall— ‘The Commencement of the Deluge’ (1848)— are time-stopping pieces. This addition of art work from Blake’s contemporaries brought a sense of the interplay within artistic movements.

Whenever I allow myself the unpressured grace to wander among works of art in a museum I feel I have been granted access to portals into the imaginal realm. Every artist has summoned an ignis fatuus. We are so inured to visual images today we forget the sheer magic of humans translating mind-taffy into concrete forms we can appreciate.

It always reminds me of an impactful museum visit when I was seventeen years old to the National Gallery in London. I took Art (which included Art History) as a subject for my Leaving Cert so I had been studying a variety of artworks across a range of time periods for my exams. One of them was the Wilton Dipytch, an egg tempera double panel on wood, which was typical of Middle Ages PR, designed to depict the English King Richard II as being on good terms with agents of divinity.1

I was very familiar with the piece, but upon seeing the panels ‘in real life’ I was blown away at the difference between the flat image in my book and the presence of the physical work. They are not large but they glow with life (helped by all that gold).

I love the variety of expressions on the angels’ faces, especially the friendly casualness of those who have their arms draped over their companions’ shoulders. It was not enough for the anonymous artist to depict the heavenly host as an undifferentiated group. The painter strove to imbue them with personality. Plus, it contains heaps of symbolism. For instance:

The hart [stag] was Richard’s own badge, and the flowers include rosemary and ferns, emblems of his first wife Anne, as well as the irises and pimpernels of his second wife, Isabelle of France. On the inside of the left wing, Richard wears a jewel of the white hart painted to resemble white enamel over gold, pearls decorating its antlers, and a magnificent collar of gold broomcods (seeds of the broom plant). His red and gold robe is patterned with harts and rosemary, encircled with broomcods. White harts and broomcod collars are also worn by the angels on the right wing.

Richard probably inherited the white hart from the white hind or doe used by his mother, but it may also be a pun on his name (Richart in French). In this period, it was customary for the badges of kings and nobles to be worn by their friends and followers. Richard’s jewel may resemble one with pearls on its antlers given to him by his second wife, while the hart badges worn by the angels in the right wing show that they are Richard’s supporters. The broomcods, known as planta genista in Latin, play on his family name of Plantagenet, but they were also the livery of Charles VI, King of France, Richard’s father-in-law.2

Over and over in my life I have experienced the powerful impact of encountering artworks in person that I had previously known through prints, books, and cinema (or advertising). Images that have become passé through their over-saturation in the modern commercial complex still have the ability to overwhelm you with their vibrant dimensionality when you meet them in their original form.

I noticed this distinctly when I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Although Van Gogh was overlooked during his lifetime, his paintings now decorate totes, t-shirts and iPad covers all over the world. He has instant recognition and it can be easy to dismiss his pieces due to familiarity.

Yet in person Van Gogh’s brush strokes on the canvases are so vivid and expressive. I felt the spirit of the man pushing out of the canvases and my eyes brimmed with tears on occasion.

His singular vision of an enchanted world vibrates to this day.

Blake (1757—1827) was an extraordinary English writer, artist and mystic, whose work divided critics during his lifetime due to its imaginative stretch, his invented personal mythology, and his upfront admission of his ‘twofold vision’, which was his description of a persistent overlay of fantastic images. Phantasms were his daily companions. Blake was home-schooled by his mother and allowed to roam freely through the fields and lanes around his home in London (now all under concrete) until the age of ten years old.

This lack of early schooling seems to have contributed to allowing his curious and artistic mind an unfiltered view of a ‘reality’ few people could access, or would want to! This freedom lingers in the dynamic charge of his strangely modern style. No wonder his art has more appreciation today than when he was alive.

Blake was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields, but on 12 August 2018 the Blake Society unveiled a Portland Stone slab commemorating the artist’s resting place. Blake fans Luis and Carol Garrido had spent two years locating the exact spot, and the £30,000 needed for the memorial was raised through donations from around the world. It reads: “Here lies William Blake, 1757-1827, Poet Artist Prophet. I give you the end of a golden string/ Only wind it into a ball/ It will lead you in at Heavens gate/ Built in Jerusalems wall.”3

Over the centuries Blake’s recorded insistence of a transcendent human experience has unsettled historians and fans, who wish to wave away his more eccentric attributes to disordered mental processes or potential psychedelic indulgences. Yet artists have continually depicted the strangeness of human experiences from our earliest cave paintings all the way to our recent expressions.

The overlay of information we can impart in art, sculpture, music, theatre, and cinema is truly special. Occasionally in text you can hit that elusive combination of described imagery, emotion and revelation to plug your reader into the ineffable field through which we all move and tremble their synapses.

Often I think writing is the most ineffective artform.

These strokes are blocks I heave my shoulder against, aware they cannot truly represent the shapes in my mind.

The ungainly reproductions must suffice.

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Much to my relief NASA’s Artemis II crew arrived safely home on Friday, after the most dangerous part of the mission: reentry.

At this critical time the Orion spacecraft barrelled into Earth’s atmosphere travelling more than 30 times the speed of sound, and had to endure temperatures of approximately 2760°C, i.e. half as hot as the surface of the Sun!

Orion’s heat shield is made of Avcoat, a material composed of silica fibers which was originally developed for the Apollo command module. It’s designed to erode slowly, or ‘ablate’, to protect the capsule, but there were serious concerns over the performance of the heat shield during the previous Artemis mission.

To reduce the stress on this vital defence, NASA adjusted the path of the ‘skip-entry’ of the spacecraft, but there was no guarantee it would hold up under the enormous strain of reentry. A skip-entry is akin to skipping stones over the surface of a river: Orion dips into the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere, then lifts back up before it dives for its final descent.

During its most intense period, the gas surrounding the spacecraft is super-heated and becomes an electrically conductive plasma, which also blocks communication between the crew and NASA. It’s a nail-biting few minutes of radio silence.

Thankfully the craft held together, and the crew arrived on time and at the exact predicted landing site in the Pacific Ocean.

In the above photo, NASA astronaut Christina Koch hugs the Orion spacecraft in the well deck of the USS John P. Murtha, after the Orion crew were collected from their splashdown. Notice the extensive charring. NASA engineers will be examining the heat shield carefully to assess how it performed during its fiery return.

As I watched the landing and I was struck at the fragility of the enterprise: the small craft swaying under three giant striped parachutes as it floated down to its watery resting place. This manner of reentry looks so rudimentary. In another fifty years people will watch this footage and marvel at the primitive technology.

The crew also became emotionally invested in a smaller but cuter bit of kit: the ‘Rise’ plush toy which acted as a Zero-Gravity Indicator (ZGI, often called Ziggy) for the astronauts. This simple mission mascot (usually a soft toy) is tethered to the craft and when it begins to float it is the first indicator to the crew that they have achieved zero gravity.

Rise was based on a design by Lucas Ye, a third grader from California who won a competition with his simple but adorable design. It wasn’t an easy contest, as the object had to fit in a 6x6x6-inch box, weigh no more than 12 ounces, it could only be constructed from a restricted list of materials, and it had to ‘represent humanity, exploration, and the spirit of the Artemis campaign’.

Rise is a mini-moon, wearing a baseball cap that looks like the Earth with a brim decorated with stars. It was inspired by the ‘Earthrise’ photo taken during the Apollo 8 mission (referenced in last week’s newsletter), and NASA’s Thermal Blanket Lab fabricated it for the mission. Inside Rise was an SD card containing over 5 million names of people around the world who wanted to virtually accompany the astronauts.

Reid Wiseman, Artemis II’s commander, became so fond of Rise that he disobeyed the instruction to leave it behind in the spacecraft.

‘I was supposed to leave Rise in Integrity….but that was not something I was going to do. I stuffed that little guy in a dry bag we had in our survival kit and hooked the bag onto my pressure suit.’

Currently Wisemann has Rise attached to his water bottle so he can see it often and remember his crew’s flight to the Moon.

I hope you all have a mascot that you can focus on when your lives become stressful. A cheery photograph or a souvenir of better times to bolster your spirits during difficult periods. The journey to the sublime Moon is followed by the terrifying flaming plunge. Afterwards, the hatch opens, light enters, the ocean spray hits your skin. Love rushes in. More adventure awaits.

It’s my birthday this week so I’m going to sign off as I hit the marker of another solar year on this beautiful planet.

Much love to you all!

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Wow, check out this fabulous picture of Earth taken by Commander Reid Wiseman of NASA’s Artemis II crew from the Orion spacecraft’s window on the 2nd of April 2026!

I watched the mission launch last week, and I was struck by the immense effort it takes to organise a mission of this complexity, and the sheer power required to escape Earth’s gravity. The last time humans flew outside Earth’s orbit was during NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972! During that voyage Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed on the Moon, and completed their final moonwalk on the 14th of December. I doubt they thought it would take over fifty years for it to happen again.1

The Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) was a super heavy-lift launch vehicle almost 100 metres tall, which generated the 3.9 million kilograms thrust necessary to heave the Orion spacecraft (named Integrity by the astronauts) with its four-person crew, cargo and supplies into low orbit.

Here’s a simple infographic from NASA detailing the milestones for the mission.

The critical moment came 36 hours into the mission, when Orion fired its main engine for five minutes and fifty-five seconds (the translunar injection burn) which set the spacecraft on its loop around the Moon with no extra manoeuvres required. It was executed as expected, and since then the astronauts have been busy conducting scientific research, observing and taking great photographs of the Earth and the Moon.

Right now Orion has successfully completed its Lunar Flyby — where the spacecraft passed by the dark side of the moon, normally invisible to us — and endured a forty-minute phase of radio silence.

During this historic flyby, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen set the record for the farthest distance from Earth travelled in a craft staffed by humans. They hit the 406,771 km mark, which is 6,616 km miles farther than the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

It’s not been a perfect trip, after all the four astronauts are living in a space that’s 5m wide and 3m high, so it’s cramped (being able to float probably helps). Plus they’ve had toilet issues: a wastewater vent line clogged, and required ad hoc plumbing.

Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun’s outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.2

This glow is referred to as Earthshine, and during the eclipse totality the crew witnessed at least five meteorite impacts on the moon’s surface — a rare display to welcome the fleeting visitors. Since the moon has no atmosphere, the objects blast into the surface unhindered, hence its deeply pockmarked surface.

The largest documented impact crater in the solar system is located the far side of the moon. Known as the South Pole–Aitken basin, it’s roughly 2,500 km wide. It’s estimated to have occurred 4 billion years ago during an period referred to as the Late Heavy Bombardment era,

… which posits that a sudden change in the orbits of the giant planets ― Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune ― threw the asteroid belt into disarray and sent those leftover pieces of the solar system’s formation crashing into the inner planets.3

The Artemis II crew are now on their Return Transit, termed a ‘free return’, as they’re relying on Earth’s natural gravity to pull them home. They’ll complete three small trajectory correction burns before their re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

I’ll spare you the details of the potential dangers facing the astronauts in this last section, but instead I invite you to imagine them at their congratulatory press conference next week!

The Artemis Crew has expressed their gratitude for their extensive support teams, and the pioneering work of the previous generations of astronauts to which they are indebted. They’ve also exhibited a psychological readjustment common among astronauts who have witnessed a distant Earth against the black expanse of space: awe and a renewed appreciation for the beauty of our home planet.

This ‘Overview Effect’ resolved into mainstream human consciousness in a visual way when Apollo 8 mission astronaut Bill Anders snapped this iconic picture of Earth above the lunar surface during the first crewed mission to circumnavigate the Moon in December 1968 (with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell aboard).

Anders recalled:

When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat up moon horizon, an Earth that was the only color that we could see, a very fragile looking Earth, a very delicate looking Earth, I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, here we came all this way to the moon, and yet the most significant thing we're seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.4

Yet, the idea had already been conceived as an important milestone for humanity. English astronomer Fred Hoyle had noted in his 1950 book, The Nature of the Universe: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available – once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known — a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

Taking photographs hadn’t been a priority for NASA when it was busy figuring out how to bring people to the moon and back safely, but during all the headlines and conversation about the race to the moon this lack was noticed.

In February 1966, musician Stewart Brand had an insight while tripping on LSD after a Buckminster Fuller lecture, and set about making buttons with the question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?

Brand had several hundred of the buttons manufactured and he put them on a sandwich board and began to sell them at Sather Gate of the University of California at Berkeley. He sent them to NASA administrators, members of Congress, Soviet scientists and diplomats, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and UN officials. He eventually brought his sandwich board to other college campuses, selling his buttons at Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and MIT.5

Often, it takes a trip away to appreciate what we have, or to realise what we need.

On 14 February 1990 NASA’s Voyager 1 was 6.4 billion km from Earth, on the edge of our solar system, and it turned its camera to take a last photograph of Earth — it was a tiny point of light.

In Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, he says:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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I have publishing news! My short story, ‘Face me. In Darkness.’, will appear in the new Gothic Fantasy anthology from Flame Tree Publishing with an emphasis on Folklore Horror Short Stories.

Here’s the information:

Our next Gothic Fantasy anthology is focused on all things Folklore Horror, and we're delighted to announce the list of authors included in the book! Available from August 2026 and featuring a foreword by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, it is packed full of fantastic short stories on the theme, encompassing global mythologies and classic horror rooted in folklore as well as new and recent stories by authors writing today.

I won’t replicate the extensive Table of Contents, which includes stories by an impressive array of living authors plus a selection of tales by past venerable writers. It will be available as a hardcover Deluxe Edition: matte laminated, gold and silver foil stamped, embossed and with 25 illustrations! It will contain 432 pages so you will get your money’s worth!

You read all the details on the Flame Tree Publishing blog post.

Continuing on the theme… back in January I mentioned that I have a novella coming out this year from the Absinthe Books imprint of PS Publishing, which is overseen by Managing Editor, Marie O'Regan.

At the time I could not divulge much, but now I can tease a little more…

The book is called House of Wyrd, and here’s the blurb:

Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and magician, is missing on the eve of the opening of her visionary project, the Path of Illumination. It falls to her estranged daughter, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, to navigate through dream, memory and arcane mystery to revisit her history with her mother in ’80s London and ’90s Ireland until Pallas catches up with present-day revelation by walking the road to enlightenment designed by her mother.

I’m thrilled with the cover art, and I’m looking forward to announcing the artist and cover in the coming weeks!

I have not reported on the antics of our beautiful sun lately, because we are definitely entering the descending stage of solar maximum. The sun had three ‘spotless’ days recently, which is the first time since 2022 that scientists observed zero sunspots on the sun, and it heralds we are approaching solar minimum. Although, this spotless record is based on our Earth-facing view of the sun as it rotates. In all likelihood there are sun spots on the far side, out of sight of our probes.

But just because the sun is downshifting into a quieter phase doesn’t mean it can’t surprise us beforehand. Notice the above mini-movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory showing yesterday's X1.5-class solar flare, which jettisoned a considerable Coronal Mass Ejection towards our planet. (Doesn’t the image look like it turns into a cat?!) The darkening is due to EUV dimming thanks to the sudden departure of solar plasma.

There is a potential for a G3-class geomagnetic storms tonight or tomorrow, and no this is not an April 1st hoax.1 As I’ve mentioned before, aurora are more likely to occur during the periods around Equinoxes, as the Earth’s axis is positioned so its magnetic field is more receptive to particles carried by the solar wind. This is known as the Russell–McPherron effect. So look up if you have clear skies tonight (although we’re close to a full moon so there will be competing glare).

That cat’s breath might rock our world!

Best of luck to the Artemis 2 astronauts: Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist, Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen.

NASA plans to launch the four astronauts on a ten-day trip around the Moon and back on the 1st of April. Let’s hope the sun behaves for their journey!

Whoosh! It’s the opening sequence from the superhero space opera film Flash Gordon (1980), and what a cracking start: Earth is threatened by the extraterrestrial Ming the Merciless, a bored tyrant-magician who is toying with our planet from afar, just for kicks, accompanied by a terrific theme song by Queen.

I doubt I’m the only person to recall the storyline of Flash Gordon currently, because one of the afflictions Ming sends to Earth is ‘Hot Hail’. Lately, our planet has been experiencing an uptick in fireball activity.

A fireball is a meteor that is so bright it’s visible during daylight. There is a constant stream of tiny meteors impacting the Earth’s atmosphere every day, and the majority of them burn up in our atmosphere. To qualify as a fireball a meteor has to be brighter than the planet Venus, which has an apparent magnitude of -4.

An interesting sidebar here is that the apparent magnitude scale is inverse, so the more negative the number the brighter the object. This system probably comes from the Greek wunderkind, Hipparchus (c. 190 – c. 120 BCE) who was an astronomer, geographer, and mathematician, often considered the originator of trigonometry (the Babylonians might dispute this). We know his work mostly via second-hand accounts, since the majority of Hipparchus’ fourteen books have not survived into this age.

Fireball reporting has generally been increasing simply because we can detect them easier, and more people have cameras on their persons, cars and properties. Yet the increase of fireballs across the world in March 2026 has been anomalous, and more of them than expected have caused an explosive detonation in the atmosphere (an airbust). This is when they are referred to as a bolide, from the Greek word bolis, which means ‘missile’ or ‘flash’ (‘A-AH! He’ll save every one of us!’)

There are several agencies tracking these events, the Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON) in France, the European Fireball Network (EFN)2 and the American Meteor Society (AMS).

The AMS has published a significant analysis of the phenomenon for the first quarter of 2026: ‘Has Something Changed in the Near-Earth Meteoroid Environment?’

The short answer is: yes, but they don’t know why.

Pieces of the larger fireballs have been found, and all of them have come from known objects. The most powerful event was a St Patrick’s Day special in Ohio, when a 2-metre meteor exploded about 48 km above ground with the energy equivalent of 26 tons of TNT. The recovered specimens are achondrites (specifically eucrites), believed to be chunks of Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt.

I mentioned Vesta back in December 2023, in a post entitled ‘Wonder’. This large asteroid is located in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and was part of a quartet of rapid discoveries in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It started with Ceres (1801), Pallas (1802), Juno (1804), and Vesta (1807). Initially, they were considered new planets, but that was adjusted later when astronomers realised the copious number of asteroids in the area. They are a significant size and Ceres is designated a dwarf planet (like Pluto).

Vesta’s name comes from the Roman goddess who was the protector of the hearth, home and family. An eternal flame burned in her sacred temple in Rome, tended by the Vestal Virgins.

These priestesses were selected before the age of ten years old by the pontifex maximus (chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs) and served for thirty years. The Vestals swore to remain chaste during this period. They could marry afterwards, but few elected to do so; some signed up for a second term. The priestesses served a number of functions, but their most important duty was keeping Vesta’s flame lit continuously, which protected Rome from its enemies. Vestals were personae sui iuris, ‘sovereign over themselves’, and enjoyed many privileges denied to women at the time.

If a Vestal had sex it was a death sentence, but because each Vestal represented Rome, it was forbidden to spill her blood. There was a way around this restriction:

When condemned by the college of pontifices, [the Vestal] was stripped of her vittae and other badges of office, was scourged, was attired like a corpse, placed in a close litter, and borne through the forum attended by her weeping kindred, with all the ceremonies of a real funeral, to a rising ground called the Campus Sceleratus just within the city walls, close to the Colline gate. There a small vault underground had been previously prepared, containing a couch, a lamp, and a table with a little food. The pontifex maximus, having lifted up his hands to heaven and uttered a secret prayer, opened the litter, led forth the culprit, and placing her on the steps of the ladder which gave access to the subterranean cell, delivered her over to the common executioner and his assistants, who conducted her down, drew up the ladder, and having filled the pit with earth until the surface was level with the surrounding ground, left her to perish deprived of all the tributes of respect usually paid to the spirits of the departed.3

In September 2007 NASA launched a space probe called Dawn: its mission was to examine Vesta and Ceres. Dawn entered an orbit around Vesta in July 2011, and completed a 14-month survey before it departed for Ceres. It arrived at the dwarf planet on March 2015, and continued its mission until November 2018 when its hydrazine fuel was exhausted — its flame went out.

The mute probe remains in a steadfast watchful vigil around Ceres.

In his final Dawn Journal entry, Dear Dawntasmagorias, the Dawn Mission Director and Chief Engineer, Marc Rayman wrote:

Dawn, however, will never again explore alien worlds. It will never again emit a bluish beam of xenon ions. It will never again communicate with beings on the faraway planet where its voyage began. It will never again perform any of the functions or tasks it executed so admirably on its remarkable journey. For decades, and quite possibly even for centuries, the ship that undertook a long, daring, difficult and successful deep-space expedition on behalf of humankind will remain silently in orbit around Ceres. It has become an inert celestial monument to the power of human ingenuity, creativity, and curiosity, a lasting reminder that our passion for bold adventures and our noble aspirations to know the cosmos can take us very, very far beyond the confines of our humble home.

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The Spring Equinox arrived in Ireland with a welcome blaze of sunshine and the collective mood of the country leaped like a March Hare. It didn’t break 20° Celsius but I spotted a woman wearing flip-flops, men wearing shorts, and a woman in a string tank top. People were licking ice cream cones, and everyone had their sunglasses on and exuded a happy, chill vibe.

It reminds me of the time I visited Athens, Greece in early November when the temperature hovered between 17-20°C. I was breezing around in a sundress and sandals while the locals wore scarves, boots, and coats and regarded me with bemusement.

We don’t experience sunny days like this very often (cue today’s blustery mixed-bag), so many Irish people heed Horace’s advice in Odes 1.11, and carpe diem!

Ask not ('tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.1

There has been a bumper crop of daffodils this year. Under the ragged hedgerows and along pastoral stretches phalanxes of their yellow heads have been bouncing in the brisk March breezes. I’m not sure there is a more uplifting sight after a dull winter than swatches of living daylight dancing in the damp ditches, especially on grey February days when they first begin to emerge.2

And what a beautiful painting I discovered — among many — when trying to find an atmospheric depiction of the spirit of Spring. It’s by Harold Harvey, a Cornish artist who was born in Penzance and studied in France before returning to Cornwall and setting about his career.

I’m going to divert a little here (zig-zagging like the March Hare), and ponder that beautiful town name, Penzance. It sounds atypical for a town in that region, and thanks to its position at the tip of the Cornish leg dipping into the English Channel (or as the French refer to it, La Manche, ‘the sleeve’) I always assumed there was some Gallic connection — mais non et mais oui!

Penzance comes from Pen Sans or ‘holy headland’ in the Cornish language. Cornish is is part of the Celtic language tree, but the Brythonic branch that contains Welsh, Breton and the extinct Cumbric. A long time ago I knew a proud Cornish man living in Ireland who was adamant that Cornwall was a separate nation to Wales and England. It’s likely that the name derives from the Iron Age Cornovii tribe that originally occupied the area, and fought the Roman invasion (and Irish raids), the Saxons, and the later rule by the Normans. Certainly their history is one of resistance.

The Cornish flag is a white cross on a black background, and is known as St Piran’s Flag. He’s the patron saint of Cornwall… and remarkably we’ve returned to the topic of last week’s newsletter: strange tales of early Irish saints!

First off it’s likely that there’s been conflation between ‘the first apostle of Ireland’, St Ciarán of Saigir, and St Piran. Like last week’s St Patrick’s tales, we’re in ‘don’t let the truth interfere with a good story’ territory. According to some sources Ciarán predated Patrick, and in others he is one of Patrick’s disciples. No doubt much of this comes from the equivalent of inter-county jostling to lay claim to the ‘best saint’. His feast day is the 5th of March, a good twelve days before St Patrick’s Day, which seems like divine timing.

Ciarán was a performer of miracles, loved to live close to nature, and was friends with animals. According to one story he blessed a well so that “it had the taste of wine or honey for everyone who drank it got drunk as well as filled“.3 A Saint who would be welcome at any party!

The story of how the Irish saint Piran arrive in Cornwall is a fantastic yarn:

GOOD men are frequently persecuted by those whom they have benefited the most. The righteous Piran had, by virtue of his sanctity, been enabled to feed ten Irish kings and their armies for ten days together with three cows. He brought to life by his prayers the dogs which had been killed while hunting the elk and the boar, and eyen [sic] restored to existence many of the warriors who had fallen on the battle-field. Notwithstanding this, and his incomparable goodness, some of these kings condemned him to be cast off a precipice into the sea, with a millstone around his neck.

On a boisterous day, a crowd of the lawless Irish assembled on the brow of a beetling cliff, with Piran in chains. By great labour they had rolled a huge millstone to the top of the hill, and Piran was chained to it. At a signal from one of the kings, the stone and the saint were rolled-to the edge of and suddenly over, the cliff intd the Atlantic. The winds were blowing tempestuously, the heavens were dark with clouds, and the waves white with crested foam. No sooner was Piran and the millstone launched into space, than the sun shone out brightly, casting the full lustre of its beams on the holy man, who sat tranquilly on the descending stone. The winds died away, and th~ waves became smooth as a mirror. The moment the millstone touched the water, hundreds were converted to Christianity who saw this miracle. St Piran floated on safely to Cornwall; he landed on the 5th of March on the sands which bear his name. He lived amongst the Cornish men until he attained the age of 206 years.4

The beach in Cornwall where Piran landed was later known as Perranporth Beach. Determined to take his unexpected voyage as a sign of his next mission, the exiled saint built his oratory on the spot and dedicated his life to contemplation. According to legend his first congregation were loyal animals including a badger, a fox, and a bear.

He’s also the patron saint of Tin Mining, because the story goes he built his hearth from local black stones which bled bright white liquid when he lit his first fire. The white cross on a black flag is meant to represent this fact.

This reminds me of the famous Poldark series of historical novels set in Cornwall, written by Winston Graham, and features Copper mining. It was adapted to TV by the BBC in 1975–1977, and once again from 2015—2019. In this regard Ireland exported another icon to Cornwall when Irish actor Aidan Turner played the lead role of Ross Poldark.

My hare hopping across subjects brings me back to the beautiful animals themselves, since the Irish Hare is a unique native species of lagomorph (hares and rabbits) — the two imports are the Brown Hare in Northern Ireland and the rabbit which pops up everywhere. The most beautiful Irish Hare rarity is the Raitlin Island ‘Golden Hare’, which has a gingerish hue and blue eyes!

The famous boxing activity of the hares in March is actually the larger females beating back overly bothersome male attention. Since hares don’t burrow, but rest in shallow depressions in long grass, heather and under bushes called ‘forms’ their babies (leverets) are born fully furred and with open eyes. Concealment and sudden speed is the main defence of the Hare. Mothers only visit their leverets to feed them once or twice a day, otherwise they are left alone to hide. They are fully weaned within twenty-one days, and hares can have two to three pregnancies in a year, which is necessary since mortality is high.

In Irish mythology shapeshifting stories abound, and they are especially associated with the Hare. Its still, but swift nature marked it as an otherworldly creature, a sign of magic, perhaps a person in disguise, or an observant ancestral spirit. It has an odd form, with its large back legs lending it a gamboling gait until it is at its top speed when it flies across the fields with majestic strides. In Irish the hare is giorria which is derived from the words gearr (short) and fia(dh) (deer).

And once again, we hop into a Welsh connection! The 12th century St Melangell’s Shrine Church is located in the Tanat Valley, Powys, Wales and is said to mark the grave of Melangell, a hermit and abbess.

Her legend states that she was an Irishwoman whose wealthy father planned to marry her for political advantage, but she wished to live a contemplative, spiritual life as a nun. She escaped Ireland around the year 590 and hid in the Tanat Valley where she lived a simple, devout life.

Many years later Prince Brychwel of Pengwern, Powys was out hunting with his hounds when they cornered a hare. Melangell was praying in a sheltered bower nearby. The hare slipped into the area and hid in the folds of her gown. The hounds refused to advance, and when discovered, Melangell protected the hare. Prince Brychwel was impressed with her steadfast demeanor and faith, and gifted her the lands as a spiritual refuge; anyone fleeing difficulties would be granted perpetual sanctuary rights in her shrine.

She established a community of nuns and over time she became the patron saint of hares. In Pennat hares were nicknamed ‘St Monacella’s lambs’5 (or in Welsh, Ŵyn Melangell) and the local prohibition against killing hares remains intact. I cannot help but notice the similarities between Melangell’s hideaway and the hare’s tactic for survival. This strikes me as a story forged with deep symbolism.

What fascinating histories of people fleeing oppression across water, hoping for a better home and opening their hearts to new people and places.

And that beautiful connection between compassion and animals. The mysterious hare, capable of solitude and wise discernment, knows a fellow follower of peace.

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Saint Patrick’s Day is winding down in Ireland and I often ponder a few things during the extra greening of the isle.

First: Ireland’s foremost national holiday is centred around the life of a saint, and we don’t have one to mark the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 or the Republic of Ireland in 1949 (there are political reasons for this which resonate through this country today).

Second: the holiday invariably lands in the middle of Lent, one of the oldest Christian liturgical periods, which was created to establish a six-week window of fasting, prayer and reflection prior to Easter.

St Patrick’s Day, with its emphasis on out-going celebrations of ‘Irishness’, tends to be an upbeat day of fun, with parades and get-togethers. Funny enough, St. Patrick Day parades originated outside of Ireland (in the USA), and the first Irish parade took place in 1903 in Waterford, the same year St Patrick’s Day was declared a public holiday.

When I was growing up in Ireland there was an accepted agreement that everyone was given a twenty-four hour ‘pass’ on their chosen Lenten abstinence. The very faithful refused this cultural dispensation, but for children who had ‘given up’ sweets, crisps, or soft drinks, this was a day of sugary indulgence!

This is a peculiarly Irish dilemma, and we invented a loophole so a good time with friends (the craic) obtained a limited expression within a period of respectable restraint. It might explain why it can get a little manic…

When I embarked upon my B.A. in English and History in the University of Galway, one of the first history classes I attended was ‘The Problem of Saint Patrick’.

It was a useful introduction to fresh-faced eighteen year-olds about the importance of paying attention to authorial bias, rooting out the best information about a subject from primary sources, and the need to dig through accumulated myths and hearsay. Many of the ‘facts’ that we know about Saint Patrick come from his own autobiography, Confessio, dated to the mid-5th century, which contains a sparse retelling of the highlights of his life. The first observation any researcher would note is that an autobiography is hardly an objective view of a person’s life. Although, Patrick’s account is humble and lacks inflation of his achievements.

What Patrick informs us in his Confessio is that he was born into a Romano-British Christian family, he was captured by Irish raiders when he was sixteen years old, and lived as a slave in Ireland for six years. During that period he herded sheep, and returned to his childhood faith with intense diligence to endure the lonely ordeal. Finally, Patrick was granted a prophetic dream which showed him a route to escape home, and he followed the guidance — he had several more adventures before he was reunited with his family. After becoming a priest in England, he returned to Ireland as a missionary. Christianity had already been introduced to the country, but Patrick succeeded in spreading the new religion.

In this document there is..

‘… no reference to the shamrock, no indication of snakes’ being driven out, and no naming of the mountain where Patrick tended animals as a slave (neither Slemish nor Croagh Patrick nor, for that matter, Lough Derg is mentioned); nor is there any allusion to the Paschal Fire on the Hill of Tara, or to King Loíguire. All of these ingredients, which we have inherited as part of the wider narrative of Patrick, derive from later traditions and circumstances. Over time the cult and status of Patrick took on such proportions as to flow from straightforward historical narrative into hagiographical writing (the presentation of saints’ lives), popular folk-beliefs, and legends, all reflective of the times in which such traditions emerged.1

Prior to Patrick’s arrival in Ireland, the first bishop was the Frenchman, Palladius, and it’s possible that some of his exploits were later conflated with Patrick’s adventures, but it’s not a clear case.

What I remember most from my course was the loud confrontation one afternoon between an older mature student and our lecturer over the material. As I remember it (autobiography is often inaccurate!), the man was a devout retired Irish-American who was taking his first university degree. He took extreme exception to the idea that some of the stories about Patrick could be ‘embellishments’.

The lecturer remained calm despite the student’s escalating anger, and eventually the student stalked off in a fury.

I was less surprised by the fanciful yarns, perhaps as a result of living in Ireland: this is a island of mythmancers, and no story remains intact after the first telling. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that after several centuries some of the first stories written down about St Patrick were by ecumenical centres keen to inflate his value as a venerable person and to cement their association with him.

Most of the histories of early Irish saints involve magical feats, visions, strange encounters, tough tests and mystical healings so this was the usual weirdness of those afflicted with profound spiritual experiences in Ireland during a period of cultural transformation.

Patrick is purported to have died around 461, but some of his remains were enshrined. Probably.

The Fiacal Padraig or ‘Shrine of St Patrick’s Tooth’, is a reliquary of wood, copper alloy, silver, gold and silver filigree, rock crystal, glass and amber, which claims to hold a tooth of Saint Patrick. The vessel originated in the 12th century and was further modified in the 14th century — rather a long time after the saint passed away. According to 9th century sources, St Patrick began to lose his teeth in his later years, and one of them was kept in a church in Silgo, and later safeguarded in a church in Athenry, Co. Galway. In the 18th-19th centuries the shrine was used to cure sick animals. It was eventually purchased and passed into stewardship of the state.

But that’s not the only preserved section of the saint…

The Shrine of St Patrick’s Hand is on display in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, and is one of two arm-reliquaries in Ireland2, but both of them are now empty.

Made of gilt silver, the shrine depicts a sleeved right forearm and hand in the position of a blessing. It is decorated with die-stamped animals and a series of green, blue and black domed glass studs.

There are another five oval studs, one of rock crystal and the other four of clear glass, decorating the bottom of the shrine. The animal ornament includes a pattern of two lions, two griffins and two stags, which is characteristic of Irish art of the Middle Ages. These details demonstrate the shrine is of Irish origin, enabling us to date the reliquary to this period.

While this practice of creating jewelled containers for holy people’s remains might seem bizarre to modern people, it’s a tradition that appears across the world in many religions.

There is a wide range of Catholic relics (from relinquere ‘to leave behind’), and they are usually organised into three distinct types: first class (the body or fragments of the body), second class (an item the saint touched or owned), and third class relics (an item that has been touched by a second class relic).

So the Irish arm-reliquaries were originally first class but are now second class.

Another second class relic is the Bell of St Patrick and its Shrine, also held in the National Museum of Ireland.

This hand-bell (clog) is constructed from riveted iron plates coated in bronze. The Annals of Ulster record that St Columcille opened the tomb of St Patrick to recover Patrick’s goblet, Gospel, and ‘Bell of the Testament’, and sent two of the treasures to churches and kept the Gospel for himself. He declared he was under angelic instruction so the grave robbing was divinely sanctioned. Irish saints were a wild bunch.

The beautiful, ornate Shrine for the bell was fashioned around 1100 CE.

Most astonishing, is how the item was recovered:

At the beginning of the 19th century, the last member of the Ó Maellchallain family, a priest about to die without heir, sent for his former pupil, the Belfast merchant Adam McLean. He told McLean to dig at a certain spot in his garden, where he found this bell enclosed in the magnificently ornate shrine that was made for it in Armagh around 1100. The Ó Maellchallain family had been “keepers of the bell” since medieval times.3

The greatest question is where is the grave of Saint Patrick (after he lost his teeth and an arm)?

It is claimed that Patrick is buried outside Downpatrick Cathedral. A large granite stone marks the spot, placed there in the early 20th century to prevent pilgrims from taking fistfuls of grave-soil away with them. However, the tradition of Patrick’s burial at this location is influenced by late 12th century propaganda (some 700 years after Patrick’s demise) by the Anglo-Norman John de Courcy. Understanding the deep-rooted appeal of the cult of relics and the important role of saints as patrons to the local people, de Courcy staged the "discovery" of the relics of saints Brigit, Colum Cille and Patrick in 1185. He exhumed their bodies and translated the relics into a new tomb at Downpatrick. 4

This need to acquire the Patrick imprimatur indicates the strength of St Patrick as a symbol of spiritual authority in the Irish imagination. Many other locations in Ireland are rich with saintly stories such as him wrestling with the Devil (at the Rock of Cashel), fasting for forty days (at the top of Crough Patrick), discovering an entrance to Purgatory (Station Island in Lough Derg), and other tales involving rocky chairs, wells, and hills around the country. He is embedded in the landscape and the naming of places and people. ‘Paddy’ is a shorthand for Irish people: amusing or infuriating depending on the context. What is character and what is fabrication?

Inspired by Spain’s Camino de Santiago, in 2015 Saint Patrick’s Way was established: a 132km walking trail in Northern Ireland from Armagh to Downpatrick, which links places associated with Patrick’s life, and ends at his burial site. Walking a pilgrimage remains a potent act — as mentioned in last week’s newsletter and in a previous one about ‘Endurance’. The purpose of the journey is clear, the body is occupied, and the mind shifts through its self delusions and truths.

When pilgrims are walking the quiet stretches, with only sheep on the pastures observing their slow passage, they are closest to epiphany.

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Thank to you my latest paying subscriber! It’s always a lovely moment when I receive that notification. Plus, much glory to all my existing paying subscribers. I appreciate the support. It struck me recently that I should schedule a few minutes into every week to send thoughts of kindness to my altruistic subscribers.

From now on my best, most joyful thoughts will be beaming in your direction weekly!

O generous benefactors: may your travails lessen, and your wonders increase!

Of course, it made me consider the topic of gratitude, and the act of thanking someone.

The word comes from an interesting Latin root words gratus and its related form gratia, from which are derived several words with harmonious connotations:

• grace: elegance or favour

• gracious: kind and courteous ​

• grateful: feeling or demonstrating thanks

• gratify: to please or satisfy ​

• gratuity: a tip given in thanks ​

• gratis: free, as a favour

• agree: to be in accord ​

• congratulate: to express shared joy/pleasure ​

And we have the reverse meanings in disgrace and ingratitude.

These are handy English prefixes, which magically alter the meaning of a word, and while they both come from Latin they had different origins and uses.

Dis means (‘asunder, reverse, apart’) and started with the proto-Indo-European *dwi-/duis- (‘twice’), which brings connotations of separation, expulsion, and negation.

The American slang term to ‘diss’ someone, comes from ‘disrespect’, but its source is the prefix, and remains a novel, appropriate use of an ancient meaning.

I wondered if it aligned with one of the titles for the Roman God of the Underworld, Dis, but that’s a shortening of Dis Pater - i.e. Rich Father. Dis seems to sprout from the older agricultural tradition of wealth being held in the earth, and he is similar to previous chthonic European deities such as Orcus. Later on he became associated with Pluto — who was the God of the underworld with connotations of inherited wealth. This is the same root that gives us plutocracy, a word that is much bandied about these days.

In- (and variants such as il-, im-, or ir-) comes from the Latin in- (not), and previously could have been spelled en-. An interesting version is the word enemy.

This is an early 13th century word that means, ‘one hateful toward and intent on harming (someone),’ from the Old French word enemi, which earlier was spelled inimi. Again, we’re back to Latin, and inimicus ‘an enemy’. This originates from in- ‘not’ and amicus ‘friend’ (from amare ‘to love’).

So an enemy is an ‘unfriend’ (this is intriguing due to the modern usage to ‘unfriend’ someone which has arisen via social media). The word enemy gained traction in the 13th century as one of the many titles given to the Christian Devil, in the sense of him being an adversary to humanity.

What a terrific poster for the black and white silent film, The She-Devil (1918), written and directed by J. Gordon Edwards, when Theda Bara was one of the most famous women in cinema. This is considered a ‘lost film’, sadly. I can’t even discover who painted this fabulous poster. Of the 52 films that Edwards directed or wrote from 1914-1924, a mere three remain.

Edwards came to prominence in the gold-rush era of filmmaking, which did not conceive of the long-term value of cinema, and did little to protect the fragility of its nitrate film stock. Big studio fires incinerated stockpiles of old reels and many more were dumped once the ‘talkies’ arrived.

Film conservation and restoration became a consideration in the 1930s when MoMa began collecting negatives. In Paris, the non-profit Cinémathèque Française was founded by Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Jean Mitry in 1936 with the aim to preserve, restore and screen older films. Thanks to their foresight, the organisation’s Frank Gery-designed building in Paris holds an archive of over 40,000 titles including posters, costumes, equipment and memorabilia.

This initiative became more crucial, and dangerous, during World War II:

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, Langlois held secret film screenings, at times in his parent’s tiny living room. The small group, if they had been caught, could have faced serious consequences, including imprisonment, for watching films forbidden by the occupation’s forces. Langlois’ archiving work rapidly accelerated during the occupation in a race against the Nazis as they censored and destroyed American and German Expressionist films. Langlois and his friends had to literally smuggle films out of Paris so that the films could remain safe.1

Having a quick look at the website, I just noticed they are hosting what looks like a fabulous program from the 18th of March - 6 April 2026, called L’Écran Démoniaque (The Haunted Screen).

Fêter les 90 ans de la Cinémathèque, c'est aussi honorer Lotte Eisner, conservatrice historique de l'institution, et autrice en 1952 de L'Écran démoniaque, ouvrage fondamental dans l'histoire du cinéma. Berlinoise réfugiée en France en 1933, elle signe avec ce livre un éloge fiévreux du cinéma expressionniste allemand. Elle en sonde les racines littéraires et théâtrales, pour mieux célébrer le génie de Murnau, Lang, Louise Brooks, et d'autres figures du cinéma d'outre-Rhin que le temps a peu à peu effacées, que cette rétrospective remettra sur le devant de la scène.

The gist is that the selection of films honours the influential 1952 book by Lotte H. Eisner (1896 - 1983): L'Écran démoniaque : Influence de Max Reinhardt et de l'expressionnisme (The haunted screen: expressionism in the German cinema and the influence of Max Reinhardt). Eisner came to Paris as a German refugee in 1933, and after surviving the war became a pioneering film critic and curator/archivist for Cinémathèque Française. She promoted this remarkable era of cinema when it was ignored by mainstream critics.

She was a mentor to many New Wave European filmmakers, including the iconic Werner Herzog, who credited her with saving him from disillusionment at a low point in his career. He recounts an extraordinary story in his 1978 travel journal Vom Gehen im Eis (Of Walking in Ice, English edition published in 2014).

At the end of November 1974, Herzog was in Munich when a friend phoned him from Paris to relate that Eisner was seriously ill and near death. Herzog was determined he could not allow this to happen, and became convinced if he walked all the way to Paris in pilgrimage she would recover. He had new boots, a jacket, a compass and a duffel bag with essentials.

He said to himself:

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. She is not dying now because she isn’t dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes. She wouldn’t dare! She mustn’t. She won’t. When I’m in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.

What an expression of gratitude!

There are few people where this story is one of the more plausible feats in Herzog’s legendary life, including his wide oeuvre of movies, documentaries, and acting appearances, his near avoidance of a plane crash, moving a steamship through the Peruvian Amazon for his film Fitzcarraldo, missing an volcanic eruption, being shot by an air rifle pellet while being interviewed on camera, and saving Joaquin Phoenix from his flipped car on Laurel Canyon road in Hollywood. Plus, he claimed to have walked around Germany’s borders in 1984, as an act of faith that ‘only poets could provide unity.’2 The Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989.

At the end of his journey to Eisner he recounted:

“I went to Madame Eisner,” he notes in the final entry; “she was still tired and marked by her illness. Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot. I didn’t want to mention it. I was embarrassed and placed my smarting legs up on a second armchair, which she pushed over to me. … Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me. For one splendid, fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.”3

May we all face life with Herzogian conviction!

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If we allow it, our world can shrink to the size of a small screen. It can fixate our attention and increase our stress, thus reducing our capacity as humans to cope with our genuine tasks and cares.

I rarely discuss politics because I know all of you are inundated with notifications, alerts swapped on a dozen WhatsApp chats, and alarming headlines on YouTube channels, TikTok, or your Broadcaster of choice.

I won’t change my policy, partly because it’s not the beat of my newsletter, and I expect you are keeping up-to-date with information at the rate that suits you best. I want to acknowledge, however, that everyone is carrying burdens. I hope you have spaces where you can ease them off your minds.

Solace begins in our hearts, and enters via love, compassion and connection. I’m reminded of ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I’m going to scamper down a rabbit hole, and I expect most of my regular readers won’t mind. I’m like Alice. If I spy a rabbit with a pocket watch bounding past me I’m off after him with fast steps. I recently mentioned to newsletter pal, , that ‘I’m a big believer in encouraging a free-range imagination.’

While searching for a public domain painting to accompany Berry’s evocative poem, I spent a merry period peering at magnificent symbolic images of Peace, mostly dressed as a pretty lady, often without sufficient clothing. Sadly, she’s sometimes pleading with burly warriors to change their ways.

Those images did not match the tone of Berry’s discovery of calm in the natural world.

Then I happened upon the above painting by Carolus Tremerie and it arrested me. I was convinced this had to be an Irish scene, but as I clicked through I discovered that Carolus was born in Ghent, Belgium on 31 July 1858 and died there in 8 June 1945. The latter feels like a significant date, but that put him at eighty-six when he passed away which was a fine age for any era.

I do what I always do, and looked up his other paintings and checked for his biography. Sadly, there is almost nothing available about his life and career.

There is a quiet beauty in both these paintings, but for me they evoke a heart-rending poignancy. Moments of peace are fragile, but they may unfurl into brave display in ordinary places: when the moon loiters in the sky, or the sun dips towards the horizon, and you are the lone observer.

The stance of the character in the second painting is so utterly familiar to me: this is an older farmer. I’ve seen so many men like him in rural Ireland: his flat cap, his hands in his pockets, his solid frame, and his stance.

He stands before his door as if poised to settle the weight of the world upon his shoulders again, but for a moment he remains bolstered by the beauty of dusk.

I imagine the birds are singing.

In the first painting, the character is a blob in a deeper twilight, almost at the door, but the green gate remains open — this is a terrible sin in the countryside. Gates are never left open, so we are invited to enter the space, or a visitor remains at ‘our’ vantage point. I like to think this is Peace.

I love that sheen upon the gate. It is a marvel of artistry.

I suspect both of these images were painted by a person in the latter stages of their creative life. The strokes are expressive, confident, and able to conjure up scenes with expert, loose efficiency.

One of his other paintings, ‘Farm at Dusk’, is dated at 1922 by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent; Tremerie was sixty-four years old.

The Great War had ended four years previously. This evening scene features a woman in a shawl, and the small open portal is more informal. There is a lot of sky, with a feeling of movement that comes from his Neo-Impressionist style. Is a misty rain falling? It seems like the woman is hurrying to a well — she is carrying a bucket.

There is a freedom here. The weight of the past lingers on the muted horizon, but the sky implies opportunity.

Observe one of his earlier paintings:

This is brighter, cleaner, more realistic, yet the subject conveys a sombre tone. The wet slush of a thaw reveals the mud. The mourners are monitored by a sister, and a woman holds back, as if unable to face the viewing and requiring time to bolster her nerves. The women before her are close together, whispering.

Diffuse morning light warms the red brick buildings. I love that slash of crimson on a single chimney.

This is the Het Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Hoye Begijnhof, also known as the Small Beguinage of Our-Lady Ter Hooyen, and is a historic religious walled community in Ghent.

Beguines were laywomen in medieval Europe who formed independent religious communities and adopted pious lives without formal monastic vows. The movement began in the 1200s in the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the Netherlands). It was inspired by figures like Mary of Oignies (1177–1213), a mystic and visionary who was born to a wealthy family but rejected the traditional path determined by her birth.

She wished to enter a religious order, but her parents refused. She was married against her wishes at the age of fourteen, but she convinced her husband Jean to live an ‘apostolic life’ in poverty and service, and to live chastely as brother and sister. Freed from family control they joined a community of like-minded devout people, and helped care for the ill and poor, including lepers at a colony in Willambroux.

At the age of thirty, with Jean’s consent, she moved to Oignies to become an anchoress (from the Ancient Greek 'I withdraw, retire') in a cell next to the choir of the priory of St Nicolas. She was famous for her extreme asceticism, including extended fasts, which certainly hastened her death, but also reportedly induced visions and acts of healing.

This drive to create communities of pious lay people continued to grow in the 12th-13th centuries. Beguines lived in enclosed Beguinages — a walled area with houses clustered around a church or meadow — and supported themselves through crafts like lace-making, weaving, teaching, brewing, and copying books. Each Beguinage had different rules, but generally the Beguines (and their male equivalents, known as Beghards) vowed chastity and obedience, but not poverty or enclosure.

In a world with few opportunities for women, these communal spaces which encouraged literacy, enterprise and a direct connection to divinity were increasingly popular. These bastions of female sovereignty were eventually undermined, and beguines were persecuted during various heretical purges, plagues, wars and during the Reformation.

Yet, many Beguinages have survived, including thirteen in Belgium which have been listed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. There has been a small resurgence in interest in this way of living in service and in community.1

Peace is not easy to maintain, either personally or with other people. So many groups seem to consider it dangerous. The still, self-governed person is difficult to agitate and control.

It’s no surprise that peace has connotations of freedom and independence.

Recently, nineteen Theravada Buddhist monks (and Aloka the Peace Dog) ended a Walk for Peace after undertaking a 2,300-mile pilgrimage (often barefoot) over 108 days from the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. Their dedication and endurance inspired thousands of people across America to show up and cheer them on, and the monks became a hit across various media.

Yet, such a feat came with a cost. During their walk through Houston, a pickup truck collided with their escort vehicle and injured two of the monks, one of them — Venerable Maha Ajarn Dam Phommasan — was faced with a choice between years of surgeries on his badly shattered leg or to have his leg amputated. He chose amputation.

‘He didn’t want anyone to feel bad for him, he said, because he was happy to be where he is and that he accepts everything that happened.’2

Their escort car, containing all the pilgrims’ supplies was wrecked, but a local businessman, was determined to help.

“I saw that and I was like, ‘No, they need some help. We gotta help them. They’re walking for us — why can we not put something for them?’” said Osbaldo Durán.

Durán outfitted a fully-insured Toyota Rav4 with new tires and extra safety lights, while also going the extra mile to change the oil and fill up the tank before offering it to the monks in an act that he himself might not have known is called “Dana” in the Buddhist tradition.

Dana, meaning “charity” in Pali, the ancient Indian language the Buddha’s teachings were written in, is the act of laymen and laywomen going out of their way to offer food, clothing, shelter, or medicine to those living the holy life.3

And since the accident Phommasan has returned to his work as an Abbot at the Wat Buddha Khanti in Snelville, Georgia.

He sits in meditation, one leg folded beneath him, the other absent. To him, nothing essential has been lost. The walk for peace continues, not with steps now, but with every breath, every teaching, every moment of mindfulness shared with students seeking their own inner calm.4

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The Winter Olympics are over, with a few disturbances, including a bit of argy-bargy (in Curling!), a variety of scandals over potential doping, a few people sent home in disgrace and the usual injuries that accrue from a series of dangerous and high impact events.

Congratulations to Irish skier, Ben Lynch, who scored eight place in the Men’s Halfpipe, which is a fantastic result for someone whose previous best placement in competition was 16th. May it embolden him to fancier tricks!

During the Olympics there were phenomenal feats, including the gold-winning performance of American ice skater Alysa Liu in the women’s free skate, who enchanted judges and audiences alike with her joyful, expressive and demanding performance to Donna Summer’s version of the song, ‘MacArthur Park’.

If you want to perk up your day, watch her dazzling achievement:

What’s more astonishing is that Liu decided to retire from skating after the 2022 Olympic Games (at the tender age of sixteen), due to burnout from training and travel, and essentially losing her love for the sport.

With time away, and beginning a degree in psychology in UCLA, she returned to skating reinvigorated and took control of all her creative decisions:

Liu insisted to her once and current coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali, that she would want a lot of input into choosing music, costumes and choreography. They acceded to her request, and the result has been the best skating of Liu’s career.

“I’m given my space and creative freedom. I’m able to really have my programs be personal and that’s kind of all I want,” Liu said.1

Her ‘I’m here to have fun’ attitude made her skating seem easy and relaxed. She connected to the crowd and they felt her enthusiasm. Pure joy is a powerful emotion to witness, and especially uplifting during competitions where people are flexing with titanic and solemn focus.

It was also a charming foil against the Summer’s Disco cover of ‘MacArthur Park’ which is about heartbreak!

‘MacArthur Park’ was a cool, retro choice, although it recently appeared in a fantastic scene in the movie Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024) which may have resurfaced it to public consciousness. It was penned in 1967 by songwriter supremo, Jimmy Webb, and first recorded by Irish singer and actor Richard Harris for his 1968 album, A Tramp Shining. Harris wasn’t new to singing. He’d appeared in the 1967 musical film of Camelot, based on the 1960 stage musical of the same name in which he played King Arthur and sang several tunes.

I first encountered the Donna Summer cover, which was released in 1978. I remember being drawn in and confused by the stream of consciousness lyrics. Summer recorded an eight minutes and forty seconds long version called ‘MacArthur Park Suite’ for her double album Live and More, but a shorter version appeared on the seven-inch vinyl single and scored Summer her first number 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

Webb confessed what the song was all about in an interview in 2014:

…it's just a song about a girlfriend of mine, Susie Horton, and this place on Wilshire Boulevard where we used to have lunch, which is called MacArthur Park. And the truth is that everything in the song was visible. There's nothing in it that's fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it's a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park.

A strange story surfaced in the run-up to the Olympics regarding an alleged doping incident, which resulted in the ‘Nutella Defence’ (as some headlines dubbed it).

Italian biathlete2 Rebecca Passler tested positive for trace elements of the banned drug letrozole shortly before the Olympics and was provisionally suspended, but she argued that she had ingested a quanta of the substance via a spoon Passler’s mother had used (she was using the drug to treat breast cancer), which Passler then used to eat Nutella. The judges accepted the explanation, lifted her suspension, and allowed her to return to the Olympic squad. This shines a spotlight on how easily cross contamination can be detected, especially with modern highly sensitive anti-doping testing mechanisms.

This happened in Italy after all, and Nutella is practically a dietary requirement.

Its genesis began with the creation of a blend of chocolate and hazelnuts known as Gianduja around 1806 in the Piedmont region. During the Napoleonic era the British naval blockade of the Mediterranean restricted imports of cocoa beans, and drove up chocolate prices. Piedmont was famous for its hazelnut crop, and the chocolatiers in Turin experimented with ways to extend their chocolate supplies by adding hazelnut butter.

Pierre Paul Caffarel established his Caffarel chocolate workshop in 1826 in Turin, and by 1865 the company created gianduiotti, which were individually-wrapped smooth chocolate-hazelnut confections.

The name originates from a popular commedia dell'arte regional character known as Gianduja (or Giandoja) who symbolised a jolly man whose plump figure indicated a fondness for good food and wine.

During World War II cocoa was in short supply, and chocolatiers once again relied on the abundant supply of local hazelnuts to bulk up their creations. In 1945 Pietro Ferrero created the Giandujot, a sweet rectangular ingot wrapped in foil that was meant to be sliced and eaten with bread as a humble treat. It proved very popular.

By 1949 the Ferrero company launched Supercreama, a spreadable Giandujot in jars. In 1962 an Italian law banned the use of superlative prefixes (like ‘stra’, ‘super’, ‘extra’, ‘iper’) for food product names, so Michele Ferrero came up with the word Nutella, composed of the English word ‘nut’ but with the Italian suffix ‘-ella’ — a vezzeggiativo, or expression of affection.

Nutella, the smooth hazelnut-chocolate spread, was launched on 20 April 1964, and began its campaign for global domination of toast and crêpes. My sense is that Nutella quickly became popular across the continent of Europe, but made inroads to Ireland later.3 There is now a World Nutella Day, which is celebrated on the 5th of February.

I could not claim the Nutella defence, however, since I do not like chocolate, and too many people know that about me.

For some people my aversion throws an instant pall of suspicion upon my character…

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What an eventful day! It’s Shrove Tuesday, the start of Ramadan, the Lunar New Year (Happy Year of the Fire Horse), and there’s been a solar eclipse over Antarctica! Only two locations could observe the eclipse properly: Concordia Research Station, a French-Italian base on the Antarctic Plateau, and Mirny Station, Russia’s outpost on the coast of Queen Mary Land.

Today’s eclipse was an annular eclipse, which means that since the moon is at a farther distance from Earth it appears smaller than the Sun and does not completely blot out our beautiful star. This gives a cool ‘ring of fire’ effect as demonstrated here:

Regular readers might remember I discussed eclipses back in September 2024, and explained how eclipses come in families, known as the saros cycle.

Today’s solar eclipse is part of the of Saros 121 family, which occur at the Moon’s ascending node: i.e. the Moon’s position is further south with each eclipse in this series (approximately every 18 years). The series began with a partial eclipse high up the northern hemisphere on the 25th April, 944 CE, and will end with a partial eclipse in the southern hemisphere on the 7th of June, 2206. This is its 61st appearance in a sequence of 71, for a total duration of 1262.11 years.

944 was a significant year for Dublin, because that’s when Congalach Cnogba, the ambitious new overking of the Southern Uí Néill dynasty, sacked the city, which was at the time was ruled by Blácaire mac Gofraid, or Blákári Guðrøðsson in old Norse, since he hailed from Viking lineage. A hundred years previously, Dublin had been officially created as the fortified Norse longphort of Dyflin (or Dubh Linn, meaning ‘black pool’), but had already switched between Irish and Norse rule multiple times.

This was a chaotic time in Ireland, with large Norse-held strongholds such as Limerick, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Wexford having strong dynastic ties with powerful strongholds across Scotland and Northern England. The Irish tribes were concurrently at war with various Vikings clans, allied with some of them, and fighting among themselves.

For instance, Blácaire was ousted as Dublin ruler after his humiliating defeat, and was replaced by his cousin Amlaíb Cuarán (also known as Olaf Cuaran). The following year Congalach was fighting alongside Amlaíb’s forces against Ruaidrí ua Canannáin, because Congalach was hoping to snag the title of High King of Ireland by murdering Ruaidrí (he did not succeed). At this point all the factions were intermarrying, so it was an era of feuds between ruthless power-hungry rulers who were often related.

Romantic ideas about a noble past are quickly squashed when you consider the awful instability of being ‘governed’ by this selection of violent despots. When I examine periods like this I’m extremely grateful I’m living in Ireland during this era.

I’ve been irregularly tuning in to the Winter Olympics — which I discussed in my last post — and other than cosy Curling (which they take terribly seriously) most of the sports possess an insanely high risk factor. Every event is taken at impossible speeds while travelling on thin or razor sharp equipment.

I was watching some of the snowboarding, and holy moly, I was tense just seeing them zipping down the halfpipe, performing a selection of impossible mid-air maneouvres in the space of seconds, and sometimes crashing badly. All that training and dedication decided in a matter of seconds, with wild card factors like the state of the course and weather conditions contributing to the outcome.

What’s amazing is when you hear the commentator discuss— as the competitor hurtles down the halfpipe—how badly the snowboarder been been injured a mere year before, but how they were determined to make it back into the Olympics despite pins in their back or knees.

It’s crazy to think that this sport emerged from an experiment called the ‘snurfer’, invented by Sherman Poppen in Muskegon, Michigan in 1965 for his children. He attached two skis together and drilled a hole in the front for a piece of baling twine to act as a steering mechanism, and decided it was a fun ski/sled hybrid for his girls. His wife dubbed it the snurfer and the following year Poppen licensed it for manufacture (you can still buy a version of the original design).

Skateboaders soon saw the potential and fans began adapting the design in their garages and running them through many iterations. It had a DIY, anti-establishment vibe, fused with the punk spirit of skateboarding. Initially, most ski resorts wouldn’t allow the weird boards on their slopes. Skateboarders had to hunt out private locations to test their design evolution. Soon, getting into the air and performing crazy tricks became part of the appeal, and the sport generated its own lingo.

The halfpipe came about from a lucky coincidence:

Two Lake Tahoe locals, Bob Klein and Mark Anolik, were hiking around Tahoe City in 1979, looking for places to practice snowboarding as all resorts in the area still didn't allow snowboarding. They found land owned by the Tahoe-Truckee Sanitation Company and started using its natural half-pipe. News of the half-pipe quickly spread throughout the Lake Tahoe community and the spot became a popular destination for snowboard and enthusiasts. It was known in the area as the Tahoe City Pipe. The spot also became popular for skateboarders.1

As updated snowboard designs became commercially available, the sport took off in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until 1998, at the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, that Snowboarding became an official event. In 2014 para-snowboarding became a medal event at the Paralympic Winter Games.

At this point it’s highly competitive and sponsored sport, with rules and standards, and the basic kit will cost you a small fortune. The anarchic spirit has eroded. The uptake of the sport has been dwindling, especially with a higher risk of injury, and skiing has an easier entry level. Snowboarders skew significantly younger and tend to age out of the sport faster than skiers.

There’s no better way to ruin the vibe of a scene than to make it popular. Eventually it becomes expensive and exclusive. Those who love the sport now must find ways to afford it and chase the snow.

Yet, when I watched those excited competitors fly down the slopes and launch into the snow-flecked air to flit and spin in gravity defying moves, all I saw were ecstatic celebrants of joy-filled possibility. In their hearts they were arcing towards greatness.

For brief seconds, brands, deals and cares remained Earth-bound.

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Happy Birthday to my revamped newsletter! It’s three years old, and I’m delighted it continues to grow, explore new territories and express opinions with such confidence! If it would only learn to make breakfast when it wakes up at 6 am…

Thanks to all my subscribers and loyal readers — especially my paying subscribers who are the most generous of all people! Every now and again I meet one of you in real life and I am heartened by your kind words about how much you enjoy my weekly ramblings.

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In the summer of 2024 I wrote about the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris and how much I enjoyed the spectacle. I don’t follow sports or athletics, but I also don’t view it with cynicism or snobbishness. I seem to be missing the genes for tribalism about teams, musicians, toys, celebrities or TV soaps. I have been keen on TV shows, but rarely to a fanatic level. And none of it grips for long.

I was raised in a home where sports were given primacy, especially GAA games: that’s the Gaelic Athletic Association, which organises distinctly Irish sports, such as Hurling (a savage fast game for men), Camogie (a savage fast game for women), and Gaelic Football (with men and women’s teams). Of course there was also Football and Rugby, and Tennis during the summer, so there was always some event on the telly. It was an era without multiple screens, so I endured it or abandoned the room in favour of reading a book in another part of the house.

Yet, even I make time to watch games (such as the World Cup) where everyone is playing at the peak of their ability. I admire the tenacity and dedication that top athletes sink into their passion, and the demonstration of well-honed skills that seem almost superhuman. There’s the drama of fierce competition between outstanding players for a medal or cup that proclaims them the best of the best in their field.

Sure, there’s a lot of money involved in some of these endeavors, but considering how strenuous it is to rise to the top of your sport, and how easily an injury can scupper your career, it’s not a vocation you can sustain without a serious love of the game. It’s agony and ecstasy in the space of minutes.

I have a soft spot for the Olympic Games, especially for the pageantry of the opening ceremonies and the procession of athletes from around the world. As a writer who thinks a lot about myth and symbols, I recognise the validity and importance of international events which laud excellence, honour and spirit.

On Friday I watched the dazzling Winter Olympics 2026 opening ceremony in Milano (and several other locations), which included a celebration of Italy’s love of art, music and astronomy.

What was most evident during the parade of athletes was their joy. Years of training, competing, failures, heartbreaks, and successes was interwoven in each person’s story. Their attendance represented significant sacrifice and commitment, and their faces shone with pride at their achievement, happiness to represent their countries, and the desire to test their prowess on the world stage.

In 2024 Paris broke conventions by keeping the Olympic Flame burning in a cauldron suspended by a hot air balloon in the Tuileries Garden, where it could be visible to the public.

This year the Italians decided to make an impressive statement by creating two Olympic cauldrons, one at the Arco della Pace in Milano, and the other at Piazza Dibona in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The dual intricate solar cages surrounding the cauldrons were inspired by ‘the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and his famous Knots, geometric interlacing symbolizing the harmony between nature and human ingenuity.’

Every hour the frames contract and expand in a beautiful representation of the beating heart of the games.

Made of aeronautical aluminum, among the strongest and lightest materials, the Cauldrons are dynamic structures that generate an opening and closing movement, bearing witness to the continuity of time and the natural alternation between day and night. Designed to expand and contract, they reveal and safeguard, like a casket, the preciousness of the Olympic Flame.

The structure features variable geometry, with a diameter that expands from 3.1 meters when closed to 4.5 meters when open. The complex mechanical system integrates 244 pivot points and 1,440 components, mounted on pins and bearings. At its core, the Flame is enclosed in a glass-and-metal container and makes use of sustainable scenic effects: no material fallout, low acoustic impact, minimal smoke emissions and complete safety for environments in contact with the public.1

The Olympic Flame is one of the most potent symbols of the games. Before it is transported to the home of the games, it is ignited several months prior during a gorgeous ceremony at the Temple of Hera in Greece.

Overseen by a High Priestess, the flames are lit from the rays of the sun thanks to a parabolic mirror. There is music, dancing and prayers. If you haven’t watched it before I’ve included the video which starts at the relevant moment (after the bureaucratic speeches).

This brings to mind aspects of the original Greek Olympic Games, which similarly kicked off with a procession. It started in the town of Elis and ended 50 km later in the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia — a two-day trek for the athletes, their families, their cities’ representatives, the referees, and the Hellanodikai (the judges).

Like the modern competitors, their predecessors (athletes, umpires, and Hellanodikai) had to swear a public oath. In the past they did so at the altar of Zeus Horkios (Zeus as keeper of oaths), where they agreed to fair play, to abide by the rules, and not to accept bribes.2

Oaths in ancient Greece were a sacred and serious business. Oathbreakers would suffer divine consequences and invite ruin upon themselves and their families. The curse inflicted upon by the forsworn was often personified by Horkos, the son of Eris, the goddess of strife/discord, and whose birth was assisted by the Erinyes — the punishing forces of vengeance who relentlessly pursue those who violate natural law and family piety.

Horkos haunted those who sundered their oaths, sometimes bringing swift retribution, but it always involved a soul-death. To break an oath is to become ‘incurably hurt’.3

In the modern Olympics, representatives of the athletes and the judges hold the Olympic flag and make the following contract:

We promise to take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules and in the spirit of fair play, inclusion and equality. Together we stand in solidarity and commit ourselves to sport without doping, without cheating, without any form of discrimination. We do this for the honour of our teams, in respect for the Fundamental Principles of Olympism, and to make the world a better place through sport.

On Saturday morning I watched a section of the Men’s Downhill Alpine Skiing, where the competitors were clocking top speeds of 145 km, and the winners were decided by hundredths of seconds.

Ireland has little history in the winter games, and our lone competitor in this race, Cormac Comerford, came in 34th — last in the field. He was twelve seconds behind the winner. It’s a tough competition. Before the race he said:

“Watching 2010, I remember thinking ‘imagine being an Olympian like that’, and I never let go of that dream. A lot of it is about timing, and I’m very proud to say I’ve qualified now.

“Being an Irish ski racer can also be incredibly lonely, there aren’t many of us, it’s a really hard path to forge.”4

One of the tragic and elegiac moments of the Winter Games has been the struggle of skier Lindsay Vonn to compete. She damaged her ACL just a week before the Winter Olympics, but was determined to enter the downhill race after she successfully completed two practice runs.

Sadly, she clipped a gate as she started, crashed badly, broke her leg, and was airlifted to hospital for surgery.

But she has stated she has no regrets on an Instagram post.

“Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport.

“And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try. I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.”

There are three other Irish competitors at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games: Thomas Maloney Westgård, Ben Lynch and Anabelle Zurbay. They are not likely to secure medals, but that doesn’t stop them competing.

They love their sport, and thanks to their inspiring efforts, they will be Olympians forever.

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Holy Moly! The sun seems set on impressing us with its mighty power at the moment. Check out this incredible image of our star from Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau, taken on 2 February 2, 2026 in Rafaela, Provincia de Santa Fe, Argentina

Up on the left-hand side you can see monster sunspot AR4366, which formed rapidly from 30th of January into a beta‑gamma‑delta magnetic field configuration, which makes it highly volatile. It ballooned until it was composed of about 45 spots mushed together and currently is about 200,000 km across, or nearly 15 times Earth's diameter. Right now it is continuing to grow.

It sparked into activity on 1 February, and the total of solar eruptions now stands at 4 X‑class (X8.1, X2.8, X1.6 X1.0), 40+ M‑class and 1 C‑class flares. Luckily, the sunspot wasn’t directly Earth-facing when all this kicked off, which means that any Coronal Mass Ejections accompanying the flares will only graze our planet’s magnetosphere, provoking minor geomagnetic storms on the 4-5 February.

Since AR4366 is rotating into direct view of our planet, if it flashes out more flares we’re likely to see spectacular visions in our night skies.

Keep watching the heavens!

The above image illustrates a tragic ancient story of remote fathers, youthful overreach, and the destructive power of the sun.

According to Ovid, in Metamorphoses1, Phaethon (and his seven sisters) were the children of the solar god Helios and the Oceanid nymph Klymene. Interestingly, Klymene was married to Merops, the King of Aethiopia, yet her children were considered the divine progeny of the Sun; Merops never gainsayed Klymene’s stories of a divine lover.

Phaethon, a beautiful prince, raised to believe his father was Helios, bragged of his parentage to anyone who would listen, including his chum Epaphus — who was the attested son of Zeus and Io. (Having a notoriously profligate and absentee father who treated his mother horribly must have made Phaethon’s story hard to bear.)

Epaphus, sick of his pal’s boasting, and seeing only evidence of a mortal father who was present in Phaethon’s life, called him out:

Thou tak'st thy mother's word too far, said he,
And hast usurp'd thy boasted pedigree.
Go, base pretender to a borrow'd name.

Humiliated and furious, Phaethon ran back to his Ma, demanding proof. Klymene swore it was the truth, and suggested Phaeton confront his father; she directed Phaethon to Helios’ Eastern Mansion (in India).

In his golden palace, bright Helios sat upon a throne of blazing gems, surrounding by the personification of Days, Months, Years, and the Four Seasons. Upon seeing Phaeton for the first time, Helios instantly claimed Phaeton as his son.

Phaethon asked his Dad for a favour to impress Epaphus. Helios, caught up in the moment of happy reunion, promised him anything, and Phaeton asked to drive Helios’ fiery chariot across the sky for a day.

Helios tried to dissuade Phaethon, and described the taxing burden:

There is not one of all the Gods that dares
(However skill'd in other great affairs)
To mount the burning axle-tree, but I;
Not Jove himself, the ruler of the sky,
That hurles the three-fork'd thunder from above,
Dares try his strength: yet who so strong as Jove?
The steeds climb up the first ascent with pain,
And when the middle firmament they gain,
If downward from the Heav'ns my head I bow,
And see the Earth and Ocean hang below,
Ev'n I am seiz'd with horror and affright,
And my own heart misgives me at the sight.

The descent in the evening was another dreadful, difficult prospect. Helios described the dangers in stark detail, and reminded his semi-divine son that the daily drive across the sky required all of Helios’ considerable expertise and prowess.

Phaethon would not be dissuaded, and with the confidence of an over-praised and indulged youth, jumped into the seat of the chariot. Caught by his oath, Helios anointed his son in protective oils and instructed Phaethon quickly in the art of driving the burning chariot and its radiant, powerful steeds across the heavens.

Completely unprepared for the task, Phaethon immediately lost control of the immense energy, and the ungoverned horses galloped off the normal track towards the Earth.

Lands, mountains and forests burst into flames and entire kingdoms incinerated. The world became a furnace under the searing wheels of Phaeton’s wayward chariot.

Alight, and also boiled by the seas, the Earth cried out to Zeus, demanding intervention:

If Heav'n, and Earth, and sea, together burn,
All must again into their chaos turn.
Apply some speedy cure, prevent our fate,
And succour Nature, ere it be too late."

To prevent the cremation of existence, Zeus flung an unerring lightning bolt at Phaeton, instantly killing the young man, and destroying the chariot.

Phaethon’s blasted corpse plummeted to the ground like a comet.

A tomb was raised for the misguided youth, and the gods mourned his loss, but none wailed as much as Klymene and Phaethon’s sisters.

Caught up in their grief, the seven sisters remained rooted around the grave, until they transformed into poplar trees. Their golden amber tears rolled down their trunks and into the River Eridanos. Klymene was utterly bereft.

Heartbroken, Helios refused to take up the reins of his reconstituted chariot. Night ruled the world for a period, soothing the charred Earth, but denying true recovery.

Zeus made excuses, entreated, and finally threatened Helios to return to his duty.

Prevail'd upon at length, again he [Helios] took
The harness'd steeds, that still with horror shook,
And plies 'em with the lash, and whips 'em on,
And, as he whips, upbraids 'em with his son.

Zeus, returning the world to rights, followed his familiar selfish, ruinous pattern, and spied another nymph to trick…

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Let’s not end on a sour note, so I’ll add a excerpt of an Orphic Hymn to Helios. The Orphic Hymns consist of eighty-seven hymns to Greek gods, which were attributed to the legendary Orpheus: poet, prophet, and musician.

Perhaps this ancient poem will soothe our agitated sun, grieving an old wound:

HEAR golden Titan, whose eternal eye
With broad survey, illumines all the sky.
Self-born, unwearied in diffusing light,
And to all eyes the mirrour of delight:
Lord of the seasons, with thy fiery car
And leaping coursers, beaming light from far:
With thy right hand the source of morning light,
And with thy left the father of the night.
Agile and vig’rous, venerable Sun,
Fiery and bright around the heav’ns you run.
Foe to the wicked, but the good man’s guide,
O’er all his steps propitious you preside:
With various founding, golden lyre, ‘tis mine
To fill the world with harmony divine.

Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792)

Yet another storm is knocking upon Ireland’s rocky coastline, bringing rain and anguish in equal amounts for some of our citizens. It is named Chandra, after the Hindu god of the Moon. The name comes from Sanskrit, and can be described as ‘shining’ or ‘glittering’.

At the moment, many roads in the East of the country are shining with flood waters!

Regular readers might remember I wrote a post last year called ‘Allegory’, which discussed the magnificent Italian frescos, ‘Allegory of Good and Bad Government’ by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338-39). Sometimes I don’t have the space in a post to dig into an ancillary subject, and this was one of those pieces. It’s thought-provoking that Lorenzetti, an artist from the 14th Century, possessed such a clear insight into what makes for positive and dire principals for governance.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised, since the notion of the Seven Virtues underpins the paintings. The Seven Virtues developed in two batches: the four cardinal virtues, followed by the three theological virtues.

Of course, it all began with Greek philosophy… Plato (c. 428–423 — 348/347 BCE) first outlined the four cardinal virtues in The Republic (Book IV) as:

• Prudence (or wisdom)

• Justice

• Fortitude (or courage)

• Temperance

Cardinal comes from cardo meaning ‘hinge’, i.e. the mechanism upon which the matter turns. For Plato the virtues were the foundation for a good life and all minor virtues flowed from that quartet. Since philosophers gotta philosophise, Aristotle rejigged them in Nicomachean Ethics, and subsequent big thinkers1 like the Stoics adopted them generally as aides for a decent life.

Prudence (wisdom) results from choosing rational deliberation to guide moral action. It helps avoid rashness or indecision, and makes sound decisions more likely. Justice is fairness in personal and social dealings, which encourages harmony in the soul and in society. Fortitude (courage) is built by facing fear and hardship with steadfast strength, especially in the face of ignoble behaviour and adversity. Temperance comes from fostering self-control and equanimity during testing times.

Notice in the above painting that Prudence holds a mirror with an honest reflection and she handles a coiled serpent, which in antiquity was a symbol of wisdom.

It’s easy to rattle off these virtues, but much harder to live in accordance with them, especially when it appears that no one else is abiding by them. Why be rational when others are incoherent, why be just when you face injustice? How can you stand firm when fear drains your courage, and why seek understanding and harmony in a chaotic era? Yet the four Virtues were described during an age that was far more violent, unequal and unjust than our current times. Millennia ago, humans realised that we need to aspire to live by better standards.2

It’s not difficult to find a supporting quote to consider by the Internet’s favourite Stoic, Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 CE):

A perennial thorny question is: how to resist corruption without being affected by its corroding influence? Considering those virtues might help. It also reminds me that ‘virtue’ is almost a tarnished word to modern ears. I think people believe it has an element of holier-than-thou about it…

And that brings us to the three theological virtues, created by Christianity, and more likely to instill a knee-jerk recoil from people: Faith, Hope, and Love (Charity). They were formulated by Saint Paul, and expounded upon by Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Love (Charity) is an easy virtue to understand, despite it being an abstract concept that is felt and experienced. It is unilaterally lauded as the most potent animating force for humanity, and is considered the prime benevolent motivator in all cultures around the world. Everyone has experienced Love at some point, even if it has been rare or fleeting. Love songs and romance stories remain the most popular method people use to lift their moods. And there is an entire spectrum of Love3, from your love of pets all the way through your human relationships to your love of art. For a force that has a miraculous effect on our spirit, humans have a strange ability to ignore the many uplifting ways it manifests.

Faith and Hope are ineffable, yet as important to human existence as Love, especially when experiencing crisis. Aquinas observed that ‘faith is of things unseen, and hope, of things not possessed.’ They are invisible and vital.

Lately I’ve been pondering both of those concepts more than usual. If you view life through news headlines and social media hot takes you will certainly lose faith in human beings as a species and abandon hope for any change. This is why this trio work together: Love is what you turn to when Faith wavers and Hope thins.

This is not the realm of logic and intellect (where the four cardinal virtues tend to inhabit), this is the magnificent ability to open your vulnerable heart and consider how you can encourage Love in the world again.

Yes, I’m aware that all the virtues I’ve mentioned can be misapplied. Even Love can be offered as an reason to hurt (see below). Deep down everyone knows when they deliberately cause harm even if they believe their cause is just.

When I was writing about Lorenzetti’s frescos last year I was reminded that all the Virtues were symbolised as women. This was first depicted in a Latin poem called Psychomachia (Battle of Spirits or Soul War) by Prudentius (circa 348 - 405 CE).

In 900 hexameter lines styled after Virgil's Aeneid, non-canonical Virtues and Vices are depicted as women engaged in gory battles; Love is absent! This portrayal arose from the fact that Latin words for abstract ideas are grammatically feminine. Psychomachia created a symbolic tradition that has continued long after Latin lost its dominance.

The Psychomachia is the equivalent of a medieval exploitation film — lots of exciting stunts and kill shots, to indulge the fantasy that brute force destroys the baddies.

And as someone who loves horror cinema and video games, I’m not exactly immune to that impulse!

I’m not ashamed to admit that I regularly think about a pivotal scene in Peter Jackon’s adaptation of The Two Towers (by JRR Tolkien). In it the ailing Frodo is on the verge of capture and succumbing to the eroding effect of evil.

Ordinary Sam, a gardener with a superpower for foraging herbs and cooking potatoes, is the one who speaks of the need to have faith, hope, and love (prudence, courage, justice and temperance are all demonstrated during their quest).

I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”

Sam and Frodo faced several terrible trials after this speech. They had to keep falling back in love with life, to retain faith in each other, and fan the flame of hope even in the darkest of places.

When the battle was over they had triumphs, mourning and departures.

You can’t execute despair; it’s part of being human.

But love can bolster faith and hope, and they can carry you through to the next adventure.

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