tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73669442011-12-18T21:22:41.547ZTales - some short, some long, some tall - from Ireland and other assorted European countries by the writer Robert Allen, author of No Global (Irish community resistance to the globalisation of hazard), Pluto Ireland, The Dioxin War, Pluto Press, and Rendezvous with Rousseau, a novel about a dead European, a very alive American and a lot of very interesting peoplestorytellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12847381197928587110noreply@blogger.comBlogger101100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7366944.post-1114694102756235412005-04-28T13:47:00.000+01:002005-04-28T14:18:37.370+01:00

An Introduction to the work of CHELLIS GLENDINNINGA sprawling village, home to about 3,000 people, Chimayó is the spiritual centre of the Río Grande in the upland desert of northern New Mexico, USA. Every Easter thousands of pilgrims trek by foot to the edge of Chimayó where they rest at a Christian sanctuary (El Santuario) to pray. It's a procession rooted in the earthly pagan history of the

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Phan Thi Phi Phi has indelible memories of the American war in Vietnam. For five years, between April 1966 and July 1971, she saw the horrors of warfare. As a physician in Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces she treated the maimed and wounded. As director of Number One Hospital, which operated mobile units near rivers and streams and close to the Ho Chi Minh trail valley, she stared into a heart

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Allegory and symbolism play a huge part in how we see our world. When Roberto Benigni, the Italian comedy writer, wrote his Oscar winning film La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful) - taking the title from a comment made by Leon Troksky when he realised that Stalin’s assassins were coming for him in Mexico - he literally inverted the horrors of the holocaust to create a story of love and joy for

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credit: swiss-image.ch When the Geneva-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that "the sweet voice of nature is no longer an infallible guide for us" he was referring to a time when the civilised world was about to embrace a new alchemical age. It was the beginning of an era that would bring us to where we are today – living in a civilised, human-built environment that is based on our

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This is the first of a series of A-Z entries that will make up the book The Lazy Vegan alberginia/al-babinjan /aubergine/brinjal /eggplant/melanzane /melitzane Solanum melongena: An Asian delicacy thought to be native to modern Burma, the aubergine upset the sensibilities of western physicians when it reached Europe in the middle ages and until the late 19th century was still being grown as

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Mary Brackwell lived in a company village on the northern side of a valley near the border between two countries. She was the mother of seven children. She should have been the mother of 16 but something happened to the other nine. Until the day she went to her own grave no one was able to tell her why so many of her children had died. The company was a subsidiary of a large American corporation

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The Aran Islands look barren because they are. To the geologist they are limestone outcrops floating a few miles off Galway Bay. To the native islanders they are the product of generations of back-breaking toil, breaking stones, building walls, bringing seaweed and sand to the rocky fields. To the visitor, a quarter of a million each year, the islands are a window looking in at the past. It has

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The approaching dusk was like an insensitive question. Like most of the insensitive questions I had been asked that day I had no smart answers. It was always the way that you thought of the sarcastic answers much later. As the blackness enveloped the Wicklow mountains the white smoke I had seen early had been filtered into the lower atmosphere where a quarter moon was rising. I could see the fire

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Berner Simplon Lötschberg express coming out of the Simplon tunnel at Iselle in Italy (picture credit: Swiss Federal Railways) AT ONE minute past seven, three evenings a week, a Grand Express left the Gare de l'Est in Paris - its destination the far eastern edge of Europe, where west meets east in a glorious expression of culture. In the days before air travel when sea routes were long and

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Irish air and sea ports have long been used as stop-overs for the US military, who, during the 1970s and 1980s, tolerated anti-nuke campaigners demanding to know if nuclear weapons were present with a 'refuse to confirm or deny' reponse, until the first Gulf War when people in the western counties of Clare, Galway and Mayo began to report large numbers of jet fighters screaming overhead.

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