When you work part-time as an editor like me, your week can take on two very distinct personalities: the bit at home where you consume lots of media like everybody else and the insider bit in the office where you’re involved in its production. This week, I was a home-based hausfrau on Monday and Tuesday. This saw me stuffing my ears with history podcasts while ironing, and reading multiple news stories from around the world while batch-cooking. From Wednesday to Friday, I was working on our very busy Features desk, helping to produce and guide stories as diverse as Michael Harding’s delightful ode to rural tradesmen and Nicola Coughlan’s comments on Gaza, and looking ahead to articles you can read this weekend and next week. The balance usually works, but it can be head-spinning. On a good week, I emerge knowing a little more about a lot of subjects, while on a bad week, I’ll be struggling to work out whether the information in my head came from something that happened today (news) or a century ago (history podcast).
That said, I hope you enjoy my selection of stories that definitely emerged this week.
1 June Caldwell did a superb job on Tuesday of putting me off being an Airbnb host for life in her piece on trying it out for more than a year. I shuddered at her tales of a guest who “told us he’d be in situ by 11pm but instead arrived at 1.40am and turned out to be a top shagger” and of an “indie-pop singer who lured her boyfriend over to break up with him in the room”.
“Really, nothing can prepare you for the peculiarities of human nature and if you’re welcoming people into a home with shared spaces, you need to be mentally prepared,” wrote Caldwell. It’s a definite no from me.
What I Read This Week: A vital read on the origins of the Troubles and Boris Johnson’s memoir flop
What I Read This Week: Adventures in Airbnb, more closed restaurants, and one unlucky goose
What I Read This Week: A bizarre Dublin conference and the human cost of war
What I Read This Week: An explosive story in Poland and a surprise budget grenade
2 As somebody who grew up in a family business and knows all about the work involved, I felt wistful when I read not one, not two, but three stories of relatively small businesses shutting their doors this week. First, we had clothing shop, Alias Tom, which blamed the “move toward less formal workwear” for its liquidation. And then there were two Dublin restaurants – Dillinger’s in Ranelagh and Shanahan’s on the Green – which joined a stream of stablemates exiting the food sector. On Friday, Corinna Hardgrave looked into the hard-headed reasons for the whittling down among restaurants, and what it’s like to be in the eye of that storm.
3 This interrogation by Hugh Dooley and Emma Hanrahan of why the number of Northern students studying in the Republic is so small offered yet more evidence of the problems that have confronted students from my native North for a while. The four A-levels they have needed to gain entry to the most popular courses in the South for several years amount to an extreme workload so it was good to read about tweaks to the points conversion rates that will be used from now on.
4 I loved this tale by Kevin O’Sullivan of an unfortunate brent goose being tracked by schoolchildren all the way from Co Waterford to Canadian Arctic only for it to be shot down and eaten by an Inuk hunter on its arrival. What really makes the story is the image of the hunter merrily clutching the tags that were attached to the doomed bird before it reached his oven, with his comments on how tasty it was doubtless teaching kids in Dungarvan something useful about the circle of life.
5 It was chastening to read Justine McCarthy’s story about Sherin Alsabbagh, an Irish citizen living in Co Roscommon, who is consumed by trying to get her 74-year-old mother Najwa Alsabbagh out of war-ridden Gaza, where she is under bombardment. Sherin has had a bedroom ready for her mother in Ballaghaderreen since the older woman was granted an Irish visa in February, but her extraction has faced multiple obstacles. Sherin says “time is running out” for Najwa, who is surviving on “one meal, or less, of rice or bread a day”.
ICYMI
This is my favourite kind of Irish Times letter: one that is short, charming and makes a simple point. Brid Fitzpatrick is commenting on Emer McLysaght’s column about the rich Irish vocabulary for rain, adding a “dawky day” to the list. My own personal favourite, which I have never heard outside Co Tyrone, is “growthy”, which roughly translates as “the kind of dampish, mildish day where you can almost see the grass growing in front of your eyes”.
Podcast of the Week
It was extremely compelling to hear a calm and low-key Sally Hayden telling Bernice Harrison on our In the News podcast about what it has been like to accidentally end up in the war zone that Lebanese capital Beirut has become in recent weeks. Sally provided stark and clear-headed accounts of the impact of Israel’s most recent actions on the people of Lebanon, as well as outlining how she goes about her work of reporting on the devastation unfolding around her.
Lebanon under attack: Locals fear another Gaza could unfold
Best of the rest
- Author and bookseller Ann Patchett’s essay on her regrets about email, aka the “black hole where time goes” was a joy in the New York Times this week. With a nod to her sister’s advice that writing on this subject would make her “look like an idiot”, Patchett almost managed to make convincing arguments for reverting back to the carrier pigeon. She also charmingly pointed to the calm comfort she finds in This is Happiness, a novel by Irish writer Niall Williams, which chronicles the shift that came with the arrival of electricity in a small Irish town.
- The Guardian this week eulogised transition year, which it described as “Ireland’s big school secret”. The article mentioned how both Cillian Murphy and Paul Mescal found their acting feet during TY, but noted that it’s not all “razzle dazzle”. It concluded that the scheme remains a good one decades after its birth.
Most Read
- Joe Canning: ‘The drinking shouldn’t have happened ... but to then run the crap out of us was madness’
- Gardaí suspect boy (8) may have been killed up to two years before he was reported missing
- ‘We moved in with each other after seven days. We got engaged after eight months’
- Liam Payne death: One Direction bandmates ‘devastated’, autopsy shows cause of death after hotel fall
- Dublin steakhouse Shanahan’s on the Green closed until further notice due to financial challenges
