Hilary Fannin: Crocs are the best contraception? It was all serpents in my dayThe nuns used to tell us that the contraceptive pill contained tiny serpents to eat our unborn babies aliveFri Mar 20 2015 - 06:00
Mandela on a tricycle in the park of my childhoodDecades ago, I saw a man beat his son with a stick in this park. That boy would never have envisaged the carnival of life here nowFri Mar 13 2015 - 05:42
Hilary Fannin: The political talk around my table isn’t always palatableYoung people seem a hell of a lot better-informed than I was at 18, as well as having better teeth and not being given to weeping over their Hotel California LPFri Mar 06 2015 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: I become uneasy as health moves up the agendaI can’t stand photos of smiley middle-aged enthusiasts with exclamation marks tagged on to their testimonials telling me that the path to enlightenment lies in sprinkling a zinc supplement on my organic granolaFri Feb 27 2015 - 05:53
Hilary Fannin: Love, sex and Oedipus in the personal adsMaybe it was the Domestos fumes, but I found a sixtysomething’s search for love in the London Review of Books upliftingFri Feb 20 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: This is a bad weekend for scared, superstitious singletonsIf you’re girding your loins against the grim confluence of Friday the 13th and another lonely ride on the Valentine’s Day roundabout, it’s time to get a gripFri Feb 13 2015 - 11:05
Hilary Fannin: I’m downright hostile to romantic gesturesEspecially when they look like a scene from a Jennifer Aniston romcomFri Feb 06 2015 - 13:46
Hilary Fannin: The world is a very different place when you can’t count‘What weight is the cat?’ the vet asks when I ask her for worm pills. ‘Five pounds’ is my random and utterly inaccurate guessFri Jan 30 2015 - 06:00
It hasn’t been easy to keep one’s pecker up in the past couple of weeksHilary Fannin: My friend who shouts wolf is right about 2015 so farFri Jan 23 2015 - 17:41
Hilary Fannin: How I learned to start worrying and love the angstNot only is anxiety a function of the times we live in, it’s also cool. Embrace itFri Jan 16 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: I’m not sure what wisdom is but sometimes I recognise its shadowMy default setting is beleaguered, not wiseFri Jan 09 2015 - 08:56
Hilary Fannin: Optimism breathes easier at this time of yearRecently some academic set about researching the top 10 things in life people most regret. Shag it, I sayFri Jan 02 2015 - 06:00
Hilary Fannin: I’m grateful that I’ve dodged the bullets for another yearThe sight of big, naked, depilated turkeys sitting up on the countertop like ghostly jurors makes me feel kind of crushed, but, shag it, all in all I’m gratefulFri Dec 19 2014 - 10:21
Hilary Fannin: It’s always Bing Crosby who will do for you at ChristmasI know when to admit defeat. I’ve decided that the only way to survive the season is to give up curmudgeonlinessFri Dec 12 2014 - 08:00
Hilary Fannin: If happiness is shaped like a U-bend, the only way for me is upWe start out youthful and optimistic, then slalom downhill as we age. The good news, according to research, is that life takes an upward swing after the U-bendFri Dec 05 2014 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: When did masculinity get mixed up with misogyny?Why should women have to house the untreated effluent, the crude, unreconstructed machinery of sexual aggression that flows out of the mouths of some men?Fri Nov 28 2014 - 08:00
Hilary Fannin: Dear Cathy and Claire, are you still out there?Jackie was an instruction manual for teen survival. For those of us lolling around on our candlewick bedspreads in our Bay City Rollers socks, it served a minor but indispensable social functionFri Nov 21 2014 - 10:00
Robbie Williams lets his wife entertain him during labourAyda looked very nice in the birthing snaps, and is shown in one ‘dancing for her husband’, which ‘helped her take her mind off the pain’Fri Nov 14 2014 - 01:00
Ghosts in the cliff house my family once rentedIt was cheap to rent in the 1970s, and was remote, wild, spooky, damp and illuminated at night by beams from the lighthouse. It was painful to leaveFri Nov 07 2014 - 01:00
Prodded, lifted and spooked at the Over-50s ShowHilary Fannin: I went to the RDS exhibition purely for the purposes of research, you understandFri Oct 31 2014 - 01:00
Hilary Fannin: Moody, middle-aged and neurotic? Give us a break‘Moody middle-aged women more prone to Alzheimer’s,’ the headline readFri Oct 24 2014 - 01:00
The motoring mishaps of a donkey on the edgeI’ve had it with weeping over the steering wheelFri Oct 17 2014 - 01:00
She hauled up my bra straps like a parachute instructorI’m no Lolo Ferrari, but I thought my friendly, cerise-pink brassiere was perfectly adequate to fulfil my needsFri Oct 10 2014 - 01:00
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor: Nidgey, Howie, PJ and meThe actor is back on TV tomorrow in series five of ‘Love/Hate’. But the punctual, theatre-loving, Donna Tartt-reading actor has little in common with his characterSat Oct 04 2014 - 01:00
Pension tension and my advice for the 30-year-old meI have a morbid fear I’ll end up eating puréed banana and clapping along to the theme tune from Teletubbies, without the added stress of penuryFri Oct 03 2014 - 01:00
The haunting of Kate Middleton gets me thinkingI’d be thrilled if my deceased mother-in-law journeyed from beyond to tell me I was calorifically compromisedFri Sept 26 2014 - 01:00
A novel way to cope with the new school termDonna Tartt’s splendidly time-consuming, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is giving me heartFri Sept 19 2014 - 01:00
Sunday shoes, mantillas and the fear of divine retributionLittle girls’ lives were circumscribed by school, Sindy dolls and the imminent arrival of stigmataFri Sept 12 2014 - 01:00
Another spin on Dublin’s property not-so-merry-go-roundMy friend calculated monthly repayments on his mobile. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Can’t afford it. What’s happened this city?’Fri Sept 05 2014 - 01:00
From Cork hills you can see farther than you’d thinkOf the small, damp group gathered on the scraggy hill that afternoon, I was the only one still living in IrelandFri Aug 29 2014 - 01:00
Wrapped for winter in my dead friend’s coatShe never tried to peddle life in a bucket of charm; our conversations were bracingFri Aug 22 2014 - 01:00
Eerie echoes of my own past in photos of strangersMost of the images in an exhibition of snaps from 30 or so families and individuals scattered around the island have a haunting familiarityFri Aug 15 2014 - 01:00
Mo laethanta saoire: Sister, you wouldn’t approve of this essayIt’s funny, Sister, how every year around this time, when the tan lines are fading, I think of youMon Aug 11 2014 - 16:06
My son’s lost wallet and an act of Killybegs kindnessIt had been a funny old week: bits of bad news had been stalking us, illness was in the air, plans were being remadeFri Jul 11 2014 - 01:00
When I was 19, America took my breath awayAn encounter with young Irish women on their way to the US reminded me of my teenage trip there. I hope their long legs tan, the tips are generous and the crickets singFri Jul 04 2014 - 01:00
Oi, stop that, there shall be no guilt-free lying in the sunAccording to the magazines I was flicking through, it was high time to focus one’s energy on developing a beach body. And there was me thinking I had to go home and crack open a CornettoFri Jun 27 2014 - 01:00
The generous sun makes us look vulnerableThere’s something forensic about the light, something too revealingFri Jun 20 2014 - 01:00
What is it about Cliff Richard that makes the women sigh?For reasons that remain a mystery, especially to me, I ended up at a Cliff show in Dublin last weekendFri Jun 13 2014 - 01:00
Anger ran beside us on the women’s mini marathonIn a country where the cufflinks still twinkle and the bonuses still soar, why are people having to raise funds for basic services this way?Fri Jun 06 2014 - 01:00
I have dusted off my award-winning shoesThe shoes are more orthopaedic than elegant, big blocky black things that cost a lot of moneyFri May 30 2014 - 01:00
I’ll turn 52 with grace and equanimity, I told the catI would like to think I no longer foolishly aspire to youthful comelinessFri May 23 2014 - 16:45
A weekend hunting ghosts in a more benign BrixtonWhen I was waitressing in London in the early 1990s, Brixton felt rawer than it does now, and still scarred from the riotsFri May 16 2014 - 01:00
How my mother’s art won over the boys in hoodsThe grey boys gave her a thumbs-up and applause, then went back to their ruminationsFri May 09 2014 - 01:00
Sometimes I envy the unmarried among usI got married at 45, when I had reconciled my inner anti-establishmentism with the realities of the tax systemFri May 02 2014 - 01:00
Women become invisible to men as we age. So what?We grow up, we go grey, we flirt with myopia, we forget where we’ve parkedFri Apr 25 2014 - 01:00
Good Friday booze binge is not what it used to beI don’t think the pub closure registers much among pulsing youth these daysFri Apr 18 2014 - 01:00
Conscious uncoupling from the cold-playing catTaking my cues from Gwyneth and whatsisname, I sit the cat down and tell her that she and I are going to have one last shot at living together peaceablyFri Apr 11 2014 - 01:00
When I was a child, you didn’t mess with moneyI met a man the other night who had grown up in my parish. We got to talking about money, or the lack of it, and how it had shaped usFri Apr 04 2014 - 01:00
Twitter: like having the world hanging around your neck on a liquorice stringAt the behest of colleagues, I reluctantly joined upFri Mar 28 2014 - 01:00
Across the shamrock from congregation to populationIt’s been a long schlep from there to here but maybe it was worth itFri Mar 21 2014 - 01:00
