It’s Sunday afternoon in sunny Ballyseede. The dog has been walked; I took him to the woods this morning so as to avoid the crowds that go walking in the afternoons. The thing with Muttley is that after six months of walking in the woods, sometimes not meeting another soul, he now thinks the woods belong to him. Some dogs he’ll ignore but others, usually big dogs, he’ll bark and snarl at. To stave off rowing with the owners I usually praise the poor hound Muttley is claiming and ask the type of breed. This morning he managed to scrap with three different

One of the drawbacks of working six days a week is that I have only Sundays to do my favourite day off things. One of them is a lie-in. That itself is now reduced to only an hour with my rising at about 8.15am or so. Getting up at this hour would have been anathema to my teenage-self; in fact at times I wouldn’t have been in bed too long by 8am on a Sunday morning, much to my father’s disgust. Not that I would be getting up to half of whatever he imagined….But since August and the 7 O’clock rises that extra hour or

The sun is shining, Freddie is in the kitchen putting the chat on Ruby’s friend Tara and Optimus Prime is trying to save us all from the Decepetrons. Freddie was happily watching the Transformer’s movie when Ruby and Tara came back from walking Muttley. For some reason or other he has a thing for the ladies and Tara is the lucky one today, well he did lend her his runners so she could go on the walk so she’s doubly lucky…..

Tomorrow is European Epilepsy Day. Never before have I had a direct connection with a day marking something of significance. Sure on cancer support days I think of my mother, on International Aids day of friends taken by the disease, Armistice Day my grandfather who fought in the First World War and Parkinson’s Day of a good friend busy kicking that disease’s ass!

At the end of a weekend you always like to feel you’ve done something with the time given. Whether you’ve lazed around doing feck-all as planned or walked Mount Brandon on Saturday and climbed Carrantouhill on Sunday at least having a memory of something done is good. Unfortunately for me I have to work most Saturdays and end up Sunday evening wishing it was Saturday again and another day off to look forward to. Adding in the usual Sunday night dread of Monday coming, a throw-back to school days no doubt, can make