@wwaycorrigan A few weeks ago on CNÑ (CNN in Spanish that is), in a discussion about social media, an Argentinian expert on the subject predicted that in years to come we’ll view our use of Facebook and the like in the same way that most of us view smoking today. That is,...
@wwaycorrigan Picture the scene. You’re a checkout operator and you’ve just finished with one customer, a lady who left a small bag of vegetables at the cash register, something she decided she didn’t want. There’s only one other person to be served in a...
@wwaycorrigan Back in my early secondary school days, as a country lad heading off to mix it with the townies, it was common for the latter to mock us. We were farmer boys, or rednecks, as they say in some parts. It was generally a bit of innocent slagging but no doubt it had its […]
@wwaycorrigan Back in the heady days of the Republic of Ireland’s «glorious» run at Italia ’90 — fair enough, the team reached the last eight but did so without winning a single game in 90 minutes — it practically amounted to treason to question the side’s approach or not to be fully supportive of «the […]
@wwaycorrigan «You’re a posh boy now, a gomelo.» So go the jibes from my old barrio buddies now that I find myself living in a swankier part of Bogotá (gomelo, for the uninitiated, is the Colombian word for what you might call preppy types). Yes, it’s true, my move a few kilometres south of my […]
@wwaycorrigan I came across … … No, let’s use a different phrasal verb considering the subject matter here. I stumbled across — much better — a quote from John Bayley, the (long-suffering?!) husband of the late Irish-British novelist Iris Murdoch. Bayley...
@wwaycorrigan An old friend once told me that in the world of gambling on horses, it’s best to be in one of two camps: The first is to know a lot about it, where you make an informed, «backed-up-by-facts» decision on your selection. The other is knowing nothing or...
@wwaycorrigan It’s pretty much accepted that money is not the chief motivator when it comes to our working lives. It plays a part to a point, but for the majority of us, there has to be more to our job than the pay packet at the end of the week or month or whenever. Whether […]
@wwaycorrigan There is an expression we use in Ireland to describe those who put themselves before everybody else. We call them ‘mé féiners’, putting an English ending to two Irish-language words, ‘mé féin’, meaning ‘myself’. Basically, you could say these are a type of fundamentalist individualist. ‘The greater good for the greater number’ only comes […]
@wwaycorrigan «You can take the man out of the barrio, but you can’t take the barrio out of the man.» OK, that old saying doesn’t really apply to me in its entirety. For Bogotá’s ‘barrios populares’, the working-class neighbourhoods, are still...
