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For My Grandfather – Dulce et Decorum Est.
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on that day, he would have been wearing his pressed suit, with medals and a poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am where, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and…
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There’s a better home awaitin’
Ben, my favorite uncle, died this morning, and the world is instantly dimmer. I have been thinking about him a lot recently, unable to watch the Ken Burns documentary on Country Music without being mentally transported to Ben’s kitchen in Magherafelt, where he would deliver to anyone who would listen, a lengthy treatise on the contributions of Flatt and Scruggs …
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A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun
Caught One More Time . . . Happy Birthday, Van Morrison.
From Cyprus Avenue on Van Morrison's 70th birthday - when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert, and the appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Back street jelly roll . . .
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Dispatch from the Diaspora, Gerald Dawe, Music, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, The Troubles, Van Morrison
Belfast & Van Morrison: Works in Progress
A version of this article appeared in the Ulster issue of Reading Ireland. There is no denying Gerald Dawe’s sense of wonder for Van Morrison – and for Belfast – in his lovely book In Another World. Culled from all the material Dawe has published on Morrison since the 1990s, it is a portrait of these artists in and of…
