My First Chinese by  Stephen Kearney   “Would you like a meal?” asked the manager, as I stood there on the work surface,  tools in hand, my face streaked in cooking oil as I told him the job was completed.  Suddenly I was on the spot – in addition to being on the...

The  Day My Universe Changed by Stephen Kearney  It happened on a fine August day in 1968.  I was waiting at a bus-stop in Ballsbridge, an up-market Dublin suburb,  on the last leg of the journey, returning home from a seemingly healthy, (apart from smoking), camping...

Standing Up by Stephen Kearney   At what stage do we develop self-perception?   When do we learn to see ourselves in relation to others?  Was I an early starter?  By the age of six I knew I was weak.  I was weak as in physically lacking strength but I was not a...

by Stephen Kearney   Art imitating life must be one of the hoariest old clichés around but even clichés must have to emerge from somewhere.  There must have been a semblance of truth in the idea somewhere, sometime.  What happens when the cliché is out-clichéd?...

Dear All, Part of the way we interact with each other from individuals to nations, is based on certain presumptions about each other's capabilities. Put at its crudest and simplest, one of the reasons that Israel is not openly attacked by its neighbours, despite the...

When Nick Clegg Came to Town   As the days to the 2010 general election were going down, the leader visits were going up.  Babies were being kissed in ever increasing numbers up and down the country by party leaders with the subsequent hand and mouth disinfecting...

  Living on a council estate (sorry, ex local authority estate, to give it its proper standing in estate agent parlance) inures you to a lot.  If you were to retain the carefully nurtured middle class sensibilities of leafy suburbia, you’d never get a night’s...

Confounding the Conditioning By Stephen Kearney “ …. And it’s not just for you” the old man continued grimly, peering over the top of his glasses during one of his many, interminable stern lectures about how I’d have to do better at school, “it’s for your wife and...