Hilary Fannin: From Wags to witches in seven easy stepsThis handy guide will lead you to the premium seats and your very own shoebox full of studded Miu Mius ... and beyondFri Apr 08 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: My tough days are fleeting. Not everyone is so luckyHow walking can help destigmatise an illness that used to be shoved to the back of the cupboardFri Apr 01 2016 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: The knot in my breast and the dangerous business of livingIt wasn’t the first time I had had a call-back for further investigation after a mammogramFri Mar 25 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: The Spaniard who came to Ireland looking for rainThe sweet Spanish woman I met on the flight home was looking forward to seeing the Giant Goose WayFri Mar 18 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: We don’t really do puberty any more, do we?We needed puberty in the 1970s. Good God, we needed any help we could get, crawling over the line to our sexual selvesFri Mar 11 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Life is far from hunky dory in our greying middle yearsWe are about as cheery and Zen as a brace of lightly spiced battery-fed chickens in the run-up to barbecue seasonFri Mar 04 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Dublin was the biggest closet in living history‘There were women, friends, who genuinely didn’t know each other were gay,’ says my friend Janice as she prepares to get marriedFri Feb 26 2016 - 06:26
Hilary Fannin: It was all allowed in the Dublin of my youthI recently had a reunion with a Dutch friend who had immigrated here when change was in the airFri Feb 19 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: My mother sees ‘the girls’ now only in her dreamsThe friendship of the four of them, their gang, their cabal, spanned the decadesFri Feb 12 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Phew, I can finally stop pretending I’m on the dryGreat news: ‘Moderate consumption of Champagne has the potential to influence cognitive functioning, such as memory’Fri Feb 05 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Marry an octogenarian billionaire? Knickers to thatI bet Jerry Hall never goes out with her underwear stuck to her raincoatFri Jan 29 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: The mortal dangers of excess weight, puritanism and lifeI’ve almost convinced myself that with a little effort, a little less vino, this year just might unravel more energetically and graciously than mostFri Jan 22 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: No more fasting and failing, failing and fastingI can’t stand the Christmas-fatty-New-Year-skinny tripe that we swallow down like a laxative every yearFri Jan 15 2016 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: What’s one drunken cherry tree in a disappearing world?The rapacious old tart of a tree was the thing that drew me to this house, and now the chainsaws were out for herFri Jan 08 2016 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: I’m unsure what to say to the universe this yearAny pearl of wisdom compact enough to fit on a fridge magnet or the side of a coffee mug should be utterly rejected on the grounds that life ain’t ever that simpleFri Jan 01 2016 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: You can keep your perfect Christmas – I’m off for a bathWhere’s the point in beating yourself to a stiff brandy-cream peak wondering why your Christmas is teetering on the brink of mediocrity?Fri Dec 18 2015 - 01:00
The vintage dress made a statement I didn’t likeThe dress I bought for an awards ceremony was tailored for a woman from many years ago, almost definitely before the advent of takeaway pizzasFri Dec 11 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Dire warnings and heavenly promises in PragueThree days of walking under a pale sun and red rooftops, necks craning, as instructed by the guidebook, to note the Baroque, the Rococo, the Art NouveauFri Dec 04 2015 - 05:45
Hilary Fannin: Is the menopause looming or has it been and gone?‘When you’re lying face down on the bathroom floor, trying to cool the raging thermostat inside you by clutching at the cold floor tiles, you’ll know,’ my friend assured meFri Nov 27 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Chin-Up Man proves even more taxing than a tax returnWhat’s an unco-operative calculator compared with an unreconstructed he-man?Fri Nov 20 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Give me back my Aran jumper, GwynethWho knew my lumpy old sweater would end up on Goop?Fri Nov 13 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: Lay people can be saints? Too bloody rightTaking kids on pilgrimage to see One Direction takes its tollFri Nov 06 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: There must be more to the over-50s life than this?‘Ah, Dickie Rock. I think he’s past his sell-by date,’ one of the women at the swimming pool saidFri Oct 30 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: I don’t have the stomach for another boomIt’s creeping back in: hibernation time appears to be over for the acquisitive middle classesFri Oct 23 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: The posh elevator and I have had our ups and downsThe disembodied voice emanating from the speaker would appear to have been recorded by a woman well-versed not just in elocution but also in jam-making, cream-clotting and twinset-wearingFri Oct 16 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: It felt radical back then to be filling in a menstrual diaryDiscovering an old teddy bear and well-thumbed editions of the Irish Women’s Diary and Guidebook in the attic brought it all backFri Oct 09 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: We’re on a collision course with an asteroid? Tell me something I don’t knowWe’re hit by our very own personalised asteroids every day of the week, annihilated over and over again by grief and disappointmentFri Oct 02 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: A fall, they say, can change everythingA&E was awash with the fallen, the wounded, the broken, the reparable and the irreparableFri Sept 25 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: A day of endless possibilities that ended with a fallI turned on the phone: missed calls, a hospital, family membersFri Sept 18 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: I’d forgotten I had a guardian angelThey used to come free with a convent-school educationFri Sept 11 2015 - 10:14
Welcome to the west: hail and complicated sheep | Hilary FanninIt’s hard to tell where one bay begins and another one ends in Connemara. It’s hard to tell and unimportant to tell, because the landscape has its own ideasFri Sept 04 2015 - 01:00
‘Next thing he’s sending you photographs of his shlong’ | Hilary FanninAlthough I wasn’t labouring under the illusion that Tinder was something used to start a fire, I had assumed it was mainly for young thangsFri Aug 28 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Piglet? Who are you calling Piglet?‘Piglet?’ the woman inquired again, looking past me at a vaguely handsome manFri Aug 21 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: A date with Death (turns out he’s Irish)This grim reaper was like one of those Dublin taxi drivers who arrives 10 minutes early and waits impatiently outside the front door with the meter runningFri Aug 14 2015 - 01:00
The Irish are happier than the French? Yeah right | Hilary FanninThey have wine, cheese and sunshine. They’re thin. And they only use cardigans for decorationFri Aug 07 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: misery, dross and diet tips on the magazine rack in the local store‘If a gossip rag’s circulation figures are wobbling like a couple of has-beens’ bat-wings, try throwing in a blearily cruel snap of Judy Finnigan to boost sales’Fri Jul 31 2015 - 06:00
Thoughts about ruthless luck and ravaged hopeI was shredding the lettuce, about to start on the pepper, waiting for the barbecue flames to die down so I could throw on a couple of burgers, when a bird flew into the kitchenFri Jul 24 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: Mouse-brown? Who pays for mouse-brown?I was thinking, while the pungent chemical mucilage attempted to imitate the colour I was born with, how entirely mad it was to sit here, spending more money than I can afford, trying to look naturalFri Jul 17 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: The biggest enemy out there is . . . dehydration?I don’t know about you, but my fears tend to revolve around potentially vile and random things happening to the people I love. But it seems I’ve got the wrong end of the mascara wandFri Jun 12 2015 - 03:00
Hilary Fannin: God wears yoga pants‘God very, very sad’ about the referendum, my friend told me. Which brought us to ‘satanic’ yogaFri Jun 05 2015 - 03:00
Hilary Fannin: This puny mortal is no match for the gregarious apple blossomIt had been a strange week. In the midst of the energy and commitment that is inherent in opening a new play, my friend in London diedFri May 29 2015 - 04:00
Hilary Fannin: My new aggressive maturity has me reaching for the eyebrow dyeMy response to time’s arrow is to encourage each year to be more liberating, more adventurous than the lastFri May 22 2015 - 04:00
Hilary Fannin: With this vote we are asking big questions of ourselvesI find the current debate around the marriage equality referendum quite emotional. We are pushing hard against a caul of restraintFri May 15 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: I was top of the class in drinking down the nuns’ wild talesMan, I loved a bit of fervour. Hand on heart, I’d like to acknowledge the energy that the nuns put into the telling of the great, mad story of their exotic worldFri May 08 2015 - 09:00
Hilary Fannin: Boys will be awfully well-groomed boysIt’s not just young girls who are slaves to images of unattainable perfectionFri May 01 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: A girl’s guide to positive body image and self-esteemThe Girl Guides programme Free Being Me attempts to unmask society’s beauty myths. Maybe I should have stuck it out in a neckerchief and woggleFri Apr 24 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: My mother was right about health insuranceI wish there were a transparent, equitable, easily accessible system of care available to elderly people who are struggling to maintain their independenceFri Apr 17 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: This week I have mostly been the ‘eeze’ in squeezedI have been inside so many waiting rooms in the past seven days that I could weepFri Apr 10 2015 - 02:00
Hilary Fannin: Sorry, Michelle Obama, group wholesomeness isn’t for meThe US first lady’s Gimme Five project is a dreadful title and an even worse conceptFri Apr 03 2015 - 15:53
Spring has sprung, for now, so we might as well enjoy itAll day long , the humans were looking unsure, fretful even. Do we get excited about this? Do we unbutton, unreel, unfurl?Fri Mar 27 2015 - 11:32
