Roy Uprichard 
What a night. In a certain Bethlehem stable. So … whilst Mary and Joseph recovered their breath, Gabe and a few friends had to be elsewhere. Startling neither Royal Court nor Temple cloister, but shepherds on a dark hillside on the edge of town; open air outsiders. No mistake, this. No misdirection. It was Intentional. As if sending a signal, you might think? Sent to those scented by their sheep, their calling keeping them from observing Sabbath. Those termed in …
The High Street of a North Down coastal town is abuzz this morning with charity Santas atop tractors, their klaxon horns fit for a second coming. Christmas jumpers are also out, tinsel wrapped, in queues outside butchers’ or flitting in and out of un-shuttered shops: saddlers, greengrocers, jewellery and watch repairs, then bakers, hairdressers or ‘Ice Creams to go’. This street from another age has kept One-Click purchasing at bay. For now. It’s still a place of interaction, of social …
The following piece imagines Lewis’s Sunday afternoon childhood visits with his mother to his grandparents in St Mark’s Manse on the Holywood Road. Then a flight of fancy follows. ‘The part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.’ Letter from C.S.Lewis to his brother. You sit at an Oxford desk staring out to woods. But instead you see the play of light on the hills and shores of home: Cave Hill, Carlingford, then Castlerock and Dunluce …
It’s late November 2019, and I’m on my way to Kilbroney Forest Park, Rostrevor, County Down to read at a C.S. Lewis Festival event. As a boy, Lewis often holidayed there with his family. Decades later, writing to his brother Warnie, he confided, ‘That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.’ It is a monumental landscape that evokes comparison with Ballinskelligs Bay in Kerry or Galician Rias. And not just for their similar topographies but …
‘The October drills of ‘62 were crazy,’ Elena said. ‘As if tables or desks would have saved us.’ As we walked, I’d already told her that one morning in my Primary school, our teacher told us in that Keep Calm and Carry On manner that World War 111 might break out any day. And that if the sirens went off, we must all get down quickly on our knees and hunch under our desks. Then she warned us to expect …
Picture a late November Advent evening last year. In a deconsecrated East Belfast church set midst where Morrisonian nostalgia lingered for decades. Oval shadowed across the way from Samson and Goliath’s stilled steel. In Mersey Street – with the heat from the wood-burning stove escaping far too quickly, swallowed in the shiver of a high, vaulted ceiling, atop paint peeling walls. Something hard to achieve, I thought – this authentic distressed look. Though somehow fitting. When we heard the story …
North of Porto, on the Caminho da Costa, the boardwalk creaks and sways to the slap of September feet as we gather each other up like strays into the community of the Road. Gerry from Dublin, ‘Just had to get back.’ His Camino Frances, two years ago, ‘was full of special people and places.’ He finds it strange that, as a member of the Irish Humanist Society, he’s drawn to the Camino. ‘I suppose religion is still lodged in us somewhere.’ He …
World events. Too many of them. Their images blur, racing past much too fast to process. Then a pause for thought midst the stalemate of home. And I’m trawling through YouTube clips of John Hume and David Trimble, in a Big Yellow Taxi moment – of not really knowing what you’ve got ’till it’s gone. Lingering over those late nineties snapshots of possibility personified by our Nobel laureates felt like bathing in the warm glow of slightly fading family photographs. …
Close now to places I walked through last year. A glimpse of riverside willows racing past the car’s window, then the Puente Santa Maria. A year gone in a flash, like the swallows skimming the road ahead. Too soon they’ll leave, towing the dreams of summer south. Time speeding up even as it counts down. Summers’ shortening, gone like the bluebirds. Leaving us with our Celtic quandary – that of souls riven by a deep love of home and yet …
The room was spartan. Two chairs, a few books on a table and a filing cabinet. Where she kept notes, no doubt – on other stragglers who’d dragged their excess baggage up the stairs. I told of the house purchase gone wrong, how stupid I felt, and the sense of being trapped. She wrote something down. ‘If only I could get an unbroken night’s sleep, I might be able to cope.’ She asked when that problem started. I weighed up …