By Fergal Smiddy, Byline Editor And just like that, another academic year – arguably the strangest one to date – saunters itself towards a bittersweet close. They say that the years of our lives tend to go by quicker as they pass, and as I grow older I find this old adage harder and harder to circumvent….
By Fergal Smiddy, Byline Editor One of the many unexpected consequences of working in retail is the intimate workplace relationship that develops between you and whatever soundtrack – if any – which serves as your on-the-clock companion. The bone-chilling melodies of royalty-free Christmas songs, for example, still haunt my dreams from past holiday seasons spent…
By Fergal Smiddy Never in my life, up until now, have I ever have even contemplated engaging in a behaviour as perverted as booking a physio appointment just to have a reason to leave my house. Just to leave my house might be stretching things a bit. Although the cabin fever most definitely spurred my enthusiasm in picking…
By Fergal Smiddy “Is glas iad na cnoc i bhfad uainn” – “Faraway hills are green”. Something mad, kind of endearing, about seanfhocail, is that they always seem to possess this annoyingly stubborn core of truth that seems impossibly relevant. Now, for the gatekeeping-inclined Gaeilgeoir out there – of whom I hope and believe there are few –…
Byline Editorial #7 – By Fergal Smiddy Working in a shop every Sunday evening – the quietest and most meandering of all evenings in the retail sector – has given me a fair bit of time to think. You might say, and you’d probably be right, that time, thinking or anything of the like are…
Another fleeting fortnight, another last-ditch scramble, and just like that – the final Byline of semester one is hot off the (digital) press. It’s truly, truly mad to think we’ve ploughed through seven of these – or six-and-a-half I suppose, thanks to the Freshers issue’s brevity – and found ourselves at the Christmas season already. …
As longtime Features Editor at the Echo and nearing two decades at the helm of the Holly Bough, there scarcely seems to be a Cork institution that John Dolan has not found himself at the heart of. Born in Warrington, a large town bisecting Liverpool and Manchester on the banks of the River Mersey, and…
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about age. Just this past week, I turned twenty-two – an aggressively unremarkable milestone, if you’d even call it one. I joked with my family about dreading the day – “sure any year past twenty-one is a year over the hill” – but if I’m to be truly honest…
Outside the Lloyd’s Pharmacy on Grand Parade, on an electrical box tucked inside the shadow of the imposing St. Patrick’s Buildings and plotted neatly between two trees is a mural commemorating the American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass. A gesture of artistic solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter installed as the movement caught flame across the U.S. earlier…
If there was a single sentence that could sum up the way life has felt throughout just about the entirety of this year so far, I think it would have to be ‘keeping the show on the road’. It’s a humble phrase, one that implies a knowledge of what it feels like to endure, and…