As the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open takes place, even with limited numbers and with all of the necessary safety measures, it also offers an important sense of normality returning to Irish life.
Blog
Lifestyle
Treasuring but moving on from the past
Nostalgia is a seductive but sometimes dangerous emotion. We can bask in it but we must also move on from it.
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Lifestyle
Raising an 11th anniversary toast to climbing Mount Difficulty
Each year on 9 June I gladly open another bottle, remembering that each vintage marks another anniversary of having reached the peak of this most difficult mountain.
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Miscellaneous
Travel retail B.C. and P.C.
Case numbers are certainly not low here. Not that I would know it judging from my first walk through my local village today, when there was nary a mask in sight.
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Travel
Back where it all began and a Flying Kiwi again
My only fear is that all these Nasopharyngeal Swabs will play havoc with my wine nosing ability.
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Travel
Any day now I shall be released
I’m going to focus on the soon-to-be-opened rather than the temporarily shuttered here as I think the real story is now one of future renaissance not bleak recent past.
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Travel
Collinson joins the dots as I return to the skies
The closest I have come to an overseas trip in ten months is via my regular ferry rides between Discovery Bay and Central. Now I can experience the real thing again at last.
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Events
How Khun Top, Susan Whelan and the flying Foxes honoured a legacy
This was a triumph not only for those players, the club and Khun Top, then. It was a triumph of legacy as that giant visage of Khun Vichai and the accompanying words implied.
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Events
The mouse that roared and the SK-II campaign that soared
The sceptics’ voices have fallen silent. As day three of the four-day event begins, it is clear that the organisers have a triumph on their hands. Dead MICE? This is the mouse that roared.
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Airports
How Hong Kong Airport is getting all dressed up and ready for take-off
Better times are coming at this magnificent gateway and the Airport Authority Hong Kong team is more than prepared for them.
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Miscellaneous
Songs from the sky in China and scenes of madness in London
When comparing notes while, like me, working on the weekend, Tian Qin quoted me an old Chinese proverb, ‘Happy life is from hard working.’ I guess that makes me a very happy man indeed.
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Travel
Lifeguards, drag queens and Dave Dobbyn all say welcome home
I would just about concede the Wallabies the Bledisloe Cup if all of us could start to travel freely again and sing our own equivalent of Nau Mai Rā.
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Miscellaneous
Tuning into Edvard Grieg’s Morning Moodie
Amid all the talk about sector ‘recovery’, the reality is that any such curve is going to be country by country, route by route, step by step (in both directions). Inch by bloody inch.