There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to [...]
I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes for many, many years. I don’t even really remember when I first started reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal tales of the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, though it has to have been fairly early – probably when I was twelve or thirteen. There is nothing unusual about [...]
As some of you may have heard, this has been an unusual week in this corner of county Wicklow. At some point in the recent past, someone skimmed my bank card — whether during the pre-Christmas period or more recently, we’re still not sure. In the last few days, someone started playing around with a [...]
In the dimness he woke and knew it was too late. Morning never came so late unless the world was ending. Fortunately, he knew what to do about that. He blinked and ruffled his feathers, looking around. This was his place. Surrounding a patch of grass were two holly trees, a pine, a cypress whose [...]
A peculiar thing happens in a number of European countries, mostly (but not all) German-speaking, on or around New Year’s Eve. The TV stations begin showing the same brief comedy sketch again and again. What’s truly unusual about this is that the sketch is in English — recorded nearly 50 years ago in front of [...]