Grieving the death of a child - help from parents who have had the experience

Photo by ericadwoodson (Flickr)

If your child has died, the only person who can really understand your loss is someone who has experienced such a loss, according to Anam Cara, a new website set up by bereaved parents. The website is full of information of people going through this dreadful experience and has links to good, international websites.

"There are no solutions or answers to your grief or pain on this website, but there is a huge amount of understanding and empathy. Everyone copes with the loss of their child in different ways," it says.

"No matter how your child has died, through an accident or long term illness, at Anam Cara we respect that your grief is your own. It also does not matter how old your child was, they could have only been minutes on this earth or grown up to be adults with a family of their own. What matters is that they are your child and the bond between a parent and child is the strongest bond of all and the breaking of that bond the hardest grief to come to terms with and accept."

Anam Cara means "soul friend" in Irish.

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Ambivalence towards violence keeps it thriving

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This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 5th February 2008:

The state pathologist, Professor Marie Cassidy, referred on a recent TV programme to a chilling aspect of violence today.

This is the tendency, when a group of young people attack a victim, to intensify the attack after the victim is on the ground, stunned and unable to protect himself in any way.

It is when the victim is in that defenceless condition that the attack really starts. By the time it is over he can count himself fortunate if he gets back to normal functioning.

I say ‘he’ because the victims are almost always male, as are the perpetrators. Indeed, we now live in a society in which parents worry far more about the safety of teenage boys than of teenage girls when they go out at the night.

Back in what I call the John Wayne days, there were certain taboos. You didn’t shoot a man in the back. You didn’t kick a man on the ground. Silly stuff? Maybe. But it beats getting some young fellow down on the ground, rendering him unconscious and then kicking him into rehab.

Of course, terrible things happened in those days, the abuse of children in institutions and in their own homes being a prime example. But the practice of going out on a weekend night to hunt down some poor sod who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to kill or disable him did not exist then.

The taste for violence is not confined to those who carry out these vicious attacks on the street.

Some years ago, I escaped into a cinema out of a wet afternoon in Paris to watch the then newly-released movie Casino. The violence in the movie really shocked me – but when the lights came on again I was intrigued to see that the afternoon audience of respectable pensioners appeared quite unmoved by the whole thing.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. “It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Decline of the English Murder. “The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World…..what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

There it is, then. A vicarious enjoyment of violence has become so commonplace we barely notice it. We hardly even register how extreme it has become – the violence on The Sopranos is just an example.

When it comes to real life, the terrible behaviour we see on our streets owes much to the influence of groups. When you are in a group you are capable of doing things which you would never do if you were on your own.

Research suggests that murders which follow disagreements and an exchange of insults are often carried out in the presence of an audience made up of friends and acquaintances of the killer. The need to play up to an audience can make murderers of us all.

But we are caught in a double bind about violence. On the one hand none of us wants our son and daughter to be the target of a vicious attack; and most of us would not want our son or daughter to be the perpetrator of such an attack.

On the other hand, society wants its members to be capable of and willing to go to war where necessary. Even in this neutral country of ours many of us demand that countries such as the US, Britain or multinational entities such as the UN or the EU should intervene in Darfur or other places where terrible events are happening. We know that such intervention may involve the use of violence – but we are all for it.

So we are ambivalent about violence – we want it and we don’t want it.

And that’s a major part of the reason why we may never come to grips with the violence that kills and maims our sons on the streets today.

Cardinal Connell takes sex abuse tribunal to court - an unwelcome blast from the past

This is the text of my article in the Evening Herald on Friday 1st February on Cardinal Connell's (pictured above) surprise High Court intervention in the work of the tribunal investigating sex abuse by clergy in the Dublin archdiocese. Since then, on Monday 4th, the High Court adjourned the case for a week. Hopefully the Inquisition is working on Cardinal Connell in the meantime.

Update: On Monday 11th February, Connell withdrew his High Court action. I guess the Inquisition did its work alright.

“Saddened but not surprised” has so far been the reaction of victims of clerical sex abuse in Dublin to the court challenge by Cardinal Desmond Connell to the examination of files over which he claims privilege.

The files, reported as numbering 5,000, could help Judge Yvonne Murphy and her Archdiocese Commission of Investigation to arrive at the full truth of clerical child abuse in Dublin. Perhaps more importantly, they will reveal just what the Church did and did not do about the abuse when it learned what was going on.

The Archdiocese of Dublin has a great deal to fear from the inquiry headed by Judge Murphy. Those who have had dealings with her are aware that she has an incisive mind, capable of homing in on the relevant details in a mass of documents – even in 5,000 documents. The former journalist expresses herself with a sort of clarity that is foreign to the Church and especially to the Church of Cardinal Connell.

We know the general nature of the details that will hurt the Church when her report is eventually published. They will concern priests moved from parish to parish and therefore put in positions of moral authority despite their misbehaviour. They will also concern the legalistic response to abuse victims and their families which left them frustrated, angry and hurt.

As a journalist who attempted to cover such issues in the 1990s, I still recall the pain of people who believed the Archdiocese had little or no interest in them except to make their allegations go away. Their experience of dealing with the Church deepened the hurt already done.

I expect those in charge of the affairs of the Archdiocese at the time believed they were acting in the best interests of the Church and that their handling of these cases was entirely in accordance with the law.

But anyone who saw the pain of victims and their families at facing what they perceived to be a closed door when it came to having their complaints dealt with could only have welcomed a searching inquiry into the actions of those churchmen.

Such an inquiry, as we all know, can only be effective if it has access to documents outlining the actions and opinions of these churchmen at the time.

The Church already faces some very dark days indeed when Judge Murphy’s report is finally published. It is unlikely that the details of what went on will differ greatly from what we know already. It is the scale of abuse and the inadequacy of the Church’s response that will deepen the harm already done to its reputation.

To weather this storm in any fashion, the Church needs an archbishop like Diarmuid Martin who can demonstrate full cooperation with the inquiry and who represents a break with the past.

But now along comes Cardinal Connell who, by his legal challenge, will lead sceptics – and even those who are not sceptics – to believe that little has changed when it comes to the Church’s attitude to attempts to clear up this mess.

More importantly, his challenge reopens old wounds and old memories for victims of clerical abuse and their families. It is like a challenge from the past to the present. But Cardinal Connell is not in the past. Like the other men who ran the affairs of the Archdiocese when he was its head, he is very much in the present. Moreover, he is a man of authority in the Church, outranking Archbishop Martin.

When Judge Murphy’s report is published, this challenge will loom large in the minds of an outraged public. It will render more difficult the job of Archbishop Martin in convincing us all that the old Church has been replaced by a new one that deserves our trust.

The pain of shyness and the mistakes shy people make

Photo by Sukanto Debnath (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column which appeared in The Irish Times on Tuesday 29th January 2008:

I was much shyer when I was in my late teens than I am today and one of the great discoveries of my life was that other people didn’t know what I was going through. I found this out when a colleague casually remarked that I was “as cool as a cucumber.” In reality, I was experiencing agonies of shyness but the discovery that other people interpreted this as confidence helped me to take the risk of social involvement.

And shyness is, indeed, an agony when at its most intense. I suspect that the agony is greater for men than for women. This is because even in the 21st century it is the men who are expected to approach the women for dates and dances.

Indeed, you don’t have to be shy to have experienced the “will she, won’t she, will I make a fool of myself?” drama that can go on in the head of a man trying to pluck up the courage to ask a woman for a date.

If anything, the business of asking for a dance is worse – that walk across the floor can seem as long and as daunting as a journey to the Antarctic.

There are certain errors that shy people make and which worsen this wretched condition.

First, they assume that other people can see how shy they are. That is why it can be liberating to realise that this is not so, as I mentioned at the start of this article.

The second error is to assume that other people are thinking about you to the exclusion of almost anything else. A shy person will walk past a bus queue and assume that he or she is being scrutinised by everybody standing there. In reality, the others are almost certainly preoccupied with themselves and some of them wouldn’t notice if you stood on your head. Similarly, shy people at a party assume that everybody in the room is looking at them and judging them – a horrible feeling – when nothing of the sort is going on.

Shy people tend to compare themselves to the most outgoing person in the room. They could make life easier for themselves by aiming to be average – instead they curl up in a ball because they know they can’t measure up to the biggest party animal in the place.

This tendency to demand more of themselves than is reasonable is a major source of pain to shy people. Worse, they tend to assume that other people expect perfection from them when in fact other people, with the exception of a few bullies, are more tolerant and easy-going than the shy person can imagine.

Paradoxically, the shy person is the star in his or her own drama. That can be said of any of us but the shy person takes it to an extreme. To the shy person, nobody on the street, in the nightclub or at the party has eyes for anyone else. The shy person, therefore, imagines himself or herself to be under intense examination at all times.

This can begin to change if the shy person somehow manages to get involved with other people or allows other people to drag him or her along with them. Of course, it will still all be agony at first but gradually the shy person’s comfort zone will expand. Maybe the shy ones won’t ever be the life and soul of the party – though some people hide their shyness behind a façade of confidence – but at least they can be at the party and can function socially with a few people at a time.

If you know somebody who is shy, there is no point in berating them for failing to fight this socially crippling illness. Such criticism will simply drive them further into isolation.

It is far better to involve them in things and to accept that they will be the quiet ones in the crowd. This will help them to begin to accept themselves and acceptance of how they are is perhaps the most important first step on the road out of isolation.

Capturing the Friedmans

If you want to get a sense of the devastation that an accusation of child abuse can bring to a family, watch the DVD of the documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

This apparently respectable, middle-class family was torn apart in the 1980s when the father, Arnold Friedman, was found to be importing child pornography magazines from The Netherlands.

Police then charged both him and his son Jesse with the abuse of children attending computer classes in their home.

The movie, released in 2003 and directed by Andrew Jarecki, leaves you, at the end, with a sense of confusion and with nowhere to go.

One the one hand, Arnold Friedman, who committed suicide in prison, was a paedophile. On the other hand, the police investigation was flawed in ways that would be unlikely to be tolerated today.

Jesse Friedman, who served 13 years in prison, continues to try to prove his innocence.

A remarkable documentary, all the more remarkable for its refusal to neatly tie up the answers for us.

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Bringing up teens - a tough call for separated Dads

Photo by .Tatiana. (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008:

Adolescence, to put it mildly, is a time when teenagers separate out from their parents.

Consider, then, the difficulties which non-resident fathers have in maintaining relationships with their teenage children.

Not only have the teens reached the stage where Dad is no longer perfect but Dad isn't there to give them the attention they want.

It is, of course, very easy to criticise fathers in this situation for not spending enough time with their teens.

But Dad probably has a job to do, complete with commuting and may have another household to go home to as well.

On top of this the teenagers themselves have to fit in study, drama, football, dancing and time out with their friends.

So co-ordinating the contact is not easy and takes an effort. It is especially difficult to do if the teens' mother and father are not on speaking terms.

A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family gives some idea of how the sense of closeness between teenagers and a divorced father suffers in this situation.

I am assuming here that it is the mother who has custody of the children.

The research was derived from a national, long-term study of adolescents in the United States.

Young people were interviewed at the beginning and end of a five year period. Their parents were together at the start of the five years but, by the end, some had divorced.

At the start, 57 per cent of the young people said they were very close to their fathers.

By the end, this had fallen to 48 per cent where the parents were still together and to 25 per cent where they were divorced. Closeness to the mother was unaffected by the divorce.

Three things strike me as important about these figures.

The first is that closeness between father and teenagers suffered whether the parents were divorced or together - though to a greater extent, of course, where there had been a divorce. This, I expect, is part of the usual war of independence that goes on between adolescents and the old folks.

The second striking point is that, given the way the study was done, all the divorces had occurred relatively recently when the teenagers were interviewed the second time. At this stage emotions would still be very raw and the father's 'rating' could, perhaps, be expected to suffer as he is the absent parent.

The third point is that we do not know how long this absence of closeness might last. The storms of adolescence die down and are generally followed by a greater closeness between parents and 'children'.

There is no reason why this should not also occur where the parents are divorced.

Nevertheless, the findings underline the fact that separated fathers have to make a special effort to keep involved with teenage children.

For this they need to be able to cooperate with the mother. That is easier said than done. Parents who are still together often fight over how to handle their teenagers. Such fights, I suspect, are just as likely to occur when the parents are apart.

But unless they are able and willing to cooperate, the scene is set for major conflict.

Other research suggests that once teenagers become fairly independent, they may shuttle between parent and parent to get what they want.

If Mammy is being a pain in the neck, then a few days with Daddy seems like a good idea. If one parent won't shell out for tickets for Oxegen, then maybe the other one - alright, Daddy again - will.

This again points up the necessity for separated parents to talk to one another about these issues and to try to reach some sort of accommodation about them.

Parents living apart, whether married or unmarried, can get help with with reaching such an accommodation from the Family Mediation Service which is part of the Family Support Agency and has centres around the country.

Its website is at www.fsa.ie and the telephone number is (01) 611 4100. They're worth a call if you're living apart and fighting over the teens.

See also: Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads.

Eighty per cent of Irish teenagers meet the guidelines for normal weight

Photo byTodd Ehler (Flickr)

I sometimes wonder if the obesity debate is getting out of hand. When doctors are busy alarming us about an "obesity epidemic" are they counting in people who are simply overweight? And are they, and the media, taking account of those who are naturally heavy?

Research reported in the Irish Independent suggests that 19 per cent of teenage boys have weight problems or are obese. The figure for girls is 17 per cent.

But the actual rate of obesity is eight per cent for teenage boys and six per cent for girls, the report says. And four out of five teenagers are within normal weight guidelines, according to Prof Michael Gibney from the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin.

So we're not all obese and the country is not sinking under our weight.

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Scientists clone men - step aside girls!

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I've often heard joking, or even half-joking, references to the notion that sperm banks mean women don't need men - or at least not relationships with men - if they want to have children. It all raised the spectre of a science fiction future in which men are culled with a few guys maybe being kept in a labyrinth somewhere to produce the necessary for the sperm bank. Escapees, I suppose, could live in a forest and grow beards. Well, guess what? Scientists have now succeeded in cloning men, at least at an embryonic level, according to this BBC report. Now who doesn't need who, girls?

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"Running away money" - when couples marry should their money stay apart?

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Women in certain parts of Dublin used to have - and maybe still have - what was known as "running away money." This was a little stash of cash that the husband knew nothing about. It was meant to fund the wife's escape if life with himself should become intolerable.

In practice, I suppose, it got dipped into for various expenses and treats. If "running away money" exists today it probably vanishes on shopping trips to New York.

I thought about "running away money" when I read that couples in the UK have become a more secretive with each other about how much money they really have. One symptom of this is that fewer couples have joint bank accounts.

In the first flush of romance, the joint bank account may be seen as an expression of undying love. But in the divorce era, when love is far from undying, it appears that couples getting married now doubt if it is wise for their bank accounts to marry as well.


The issue of joint control over money also raised its head last week when the Liveline on RTE Radio 1 addressed the question of child benefit or the children’s allowance as it used to be called. Listeners heard stories of bad behaviour by both genders. On one side, there was the man who kept his wife and children on a subsistence allowance because money had to be prioritised for his drinking. On the other, there was the woman who left her husband and children and went to live in England a couple of decades ago. The husband was told he could not get the children's allowance; so whenever the wife came home to Ireland from England she popped into the post office, collected her children's allowance and used the money to help to fund her new lifestyle.

Even in the absence of such extremes, it is not all that unusual for each partner in a long-term relationship to have a different attitude to money. Perhaps one is cautious and the other is of the Spend! Spend! Spend! mentality, for instance. If they could talk about money matters in a rational way, they could avoid a great many problems. But how many of us are capable of talking to our partner in a rational way about money? Suppose you divide a page into two columns and note on one side the times you have had a rational, logical conversation about money with your nearest and dearest and on the other side the times you fought over money. Which column would be the longest? Unless you’re living with Eddie Hobbs, I suspect it would be the second one.

The emotions and, sometimes, bad behaviour that accompany money are, needless to say, carried into relationship breakdown. Separating partners have an interest in hiding from each other their true financial status. Money may be removed from bank accounts, for instance. If one partner gets a pay rise it may be kept very quiet. In mediation between separating couples, the point at which the mediator puts up on a flipchart the expense of running two households can be an early breaking point.

In a discussion on the topic on BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour last week, Jonathan Self (author of The Teenager's Guide to Money) suggested that attitudes to money should be discussed with anybody you are thinking of having a relationship with. He even suggested that the topic is sufficiently important for a first date.

That’s fine if your first date happens to be an accountant, a revenue official or a banker. For the rest of us, though, it strikes me as a bridge too far, too soon – the sound of first dates running very fast in the opposite direction could become a familiar one. Best confine yourself to trying for a kiss and park the money issue until the next time.

And if the relationship flourishes and you end up together until death or irreconcilable differences do you part, I hope each of you will be wise enough to have your own little stash of "running away money" hidden in the post office.

Internet pornography now the main form of sex addiction, counsellors say

The obsessive use of internet pornography has become the most common form of sex addiction, according to a survey of therapists by the Newsbeat programme on BBC Radio 1.

Forty three therapists responded to a questionnaire and 80 per cent said sex addiction was a problem.

In extreme cases men spend eight hours a day looking at pornography and, as a result, their relationships and their jobs can be at risk.

Relate, the relationship counselling organisation, says there has been a huge increase in the number of people presenting because of excessive use of internet pornography and compulsive sexual behaviour.

Relate counsellors also wonder how the ability of teenagers to have normal sexual relationships as they grow up will be affected by the easy availability of pornographic images.

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Love and maintenance

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 8th January 2008:

A poem by the late Detroit poet Robert Hayden brings home the importance of recognising a sort of love that that has little to do with romance but which deserves to be acknowledged and praised nevertheless. Called Those Winter Sundays it begins:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

The image of the father who gets up in bitter cold to light the fires for the family before they, too, arise is probably somewhat dated in the central heating era but the principle remains: that such acts can be, in their own way, acts of love.

They are also, very often, unacknowledged. Hayden talks of getting up in the now warm house and

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Note: Click here for the full poem.

A few weeks ago, on Sarah Carey's GUBU blog, I came across a poem by the British poet UA Fanthorpe which expresses the same idea. It begins:

"There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget the milkman, which remembers to plant bulbs;"

Note: Click here for the full poem.

(WD40, if you don't know, is a type of oil good for rust prevention and other purposes.)

And it's not all sweetness and light. Hayden was raised by foster parents who had a very troubled marriage and the effects stayed with him throughout his life. Indeed, in the poem mentioned above he talks about "the chronic angers of that house." Nevertheless, he recognised in later life the value of the practical things done for him by the foster father whom he often had reason to fear.

It seems to me that for people who have had a harsh upbringing there can sometimes be a kind of healing in this realisation. A parent might be unexpressive about love but might nevertheless build his or her life around the needs of the child or the other parent.

This realisation is also part of the Japanese Naikan meditation which I have mentioned before in this column. To do Naikan, you call to mind someone who was or is important to you even if - perhaps especially if - you have a big resentment against that person. You then ask yourself three questions and reflect on each in turn: What has this person given me, what have I given this person and what troubles have I caused this person?

You are encouraged to be very specific in your answers. Maybe all you can think of is that this person put food on the table, ironed your clothes and saw to it that you went to school. You may be full of justifiable anger towards them but there are, nevertheless, these things that they did for you. And there are, after all, parents who don't do even these things for their children.

All of this is a million miles removed from romantic love which involves doing things for the other person simply because they are romantic and without much regard to whether they are useful. A bouquet of roses hasn't got a lot of utility to it but it can get a guy out of trouble because it appeals to the romantic side of love. So if you want a flourishing relationship with your significant other, don't rely on the "love called maintenance" but throw a little romance into the mix as well.

But never underestimate the importance of the "love called maintenance" either. In some people it can simply be a sour expression of a resented duty. But in others, it can be as true an expression of love as the roses and the box of chocolates and the diamond ring, or maybe even truer. That it so often goes unappreciated and unacknowledged -as by Robert Hayden as a child - does nothing to alter this fact.

Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads

While fathers are often criticised for having insufficient contact with their children following a separation, it seems to me that the logistics of holding down and job and living elsewhere can make it tough for separated fathers to keep the level of contact they - or most of them - would like. Both the children and the (usually) mother they are living with have their own routines around work, school and extra-curricular activities and navigating around these is difficult especially if the relationship between the parents is one of hostility.

Now a piece of research reported on Psych Central News shows that there is a particular danger of separated Dads finding themselves distanced from their teenage children unless they are able to make an extra effort to keep up contact. The US research, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that 48 per cent of teenagers questioned said they had a consistently close relationship with their father where the parents were still together. But if the parents were divorced that percentage fell to 25 per cent. Divorce did not significantly affect the relationship with the mother.

This suggests that separated men need to work extra hard on their relationship with their teenage children. As I mentioned above, that can be a very tall order indeed and it requires the cooperation of all concerned.

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Rural suicide figures suggest urban life not as unhealthy as we assume

We often think of life in cities and towns as unpleasant, hurried, stressful and therefore unhealthy - but the latest suicide figures from Co Clare suggest we may be wrong.

Last year, according to Gordon Deegan's story (premium content) in The Irish Times, 17 people (16 male) took their own lives in the county. This exceeds the number of deaths (12) from road accidents.

Of the 17 suicides, 11 took place in rural areas and 10 during the summer months. This is puzzling because we also expect a stronger sense of community in rural areas than in cities and towns - and community protects against depression.

Does anyone have an explanation?

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Hillary Clinton - emotional in New Hampshire or just an act?

Hillary Clinton at the Café Espresso, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Who says big boys don't cry? And who says girls are crybabies? When Bill Clinton turns on the tears everybody's impressed but when Hillary gets emotional, the first thought in the minds of viewers is - Is she faking it? As she faced defeat in the New Hampshire primary, did she feel a softer, gentler Hillary was in order? And if people reckon she was putting it on, won't that damage her image among voters who think she ought to be more weepy? What a dilemma - it's enough to drive you to tears.

Ps (Next day) And she won! Time for tears from Obama? And in the next Irish election should Enda and Master Gilmore get out the Kleenex?

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Men are missing from doctors' surgeries - and from health policy

I suspect many men would say women go to the doctor at the drop of a hat. They seem to regard the doctor as a friend whom they mean to see quite often. We men, on the other hand, see the doctor's surgery as a place to be avoided at all costs - no need to present yourself there until you've had a distressing disease for at least a couple of years. Even then shure what's the hurry? Well, it's just possible - maybe more than possible - that their willingness to go to the doctor is a key factor in helpling women to live longer than men. This article on the website of the Men's Health Forum England & Wales suggests that many more men could live longer if we saw our doctors more often and if health policy aimed to take our needs into account. In Britain it is now law that the health service take the needs of the differing genders into account but it's a new law and we don't know yet how effective it is going to be. But at least they're trying.....

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Those Winter Mornings: Seeing the love in ordinary duties

Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays by Detroit poet Robert Hayden celebrates the many things done by fathers and, indeed, mothers, even in the most troubled marriages and which we fail to count as love until, perhaps, it is too late:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

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Sometimes togetherness is just too much!

Photo by papalars (Flickr)

Togetherness between men and women is to be encouraged - but sometimes it goes too far. I first came to this conclusion in Captain America's in Grafton Street when I observed a couple who not only wore the same pullovers but ordered the same dish. Fair enough, you may say, but this pair ordered their burgers and chips on the same plate with two sets of knives and forks and continued to tuck in, totally together, totally sharing. Well, at least they ordered separate knives and forks.

A couple of years ago in Lanzarote I saw another example of togetherness. We discovered to our amazement that the apartment complex we were in allowed residents to eat all they could at its restaurant for the whole week at no extra cost. This deal had attracted loads of obese people. Obese couples and, indeed, entire obese families, moved back and forth from food counter to tables with an odd, floating motion as if they were in an aquarium. It was remarkable to see Mum, Dad, sons, daughters, all going around like large dolphins - togetherness indeed.

In both these examples - I could come up with others but you get the idea - I reckon togetherness can be tyrannical. If loving hubby or loving wifey had decided they wanted to have their own goddam burger on their own goddam plate mightn't they have been spending the rest of the day, and night, in the doghouse? And what of the families in Lanzarote? Imagine being the one who wants to slim down, run ten miles a day, get slim and muscular? FREAK!

Now, I'm a chap who likes his space. I get twitchy at a crowded dinner table. At parties, I get bored around midnight. So I'm never going to be into the levels of togetherness I've described above - but would you?

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Gout - an under-rated and exceptionally painful man's disease

Image from irishhealth.com

Gout tends to be treated as a bit of a joke, seen as a well-deserved affliction of lords and kings. Of course, the majority of men who have gout are in neither category. This Guardian article by Martin Kettle graphically explains the awfulness of this male disease - and the comments to the article are informative too.

For a more technical article on gout, follow this link to irishhealth.com.

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Our self-catering bungalow in County Leitrim

Leave it all behind! Chill out at Lakefield, a modern bungalow refurbished to a high standard overlooking Carrickport Lake in Co Leitrim available for weekly holiday rentals. Click here to go to the website.

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My training workshops

I present workshops on workplace bullying, stress management, time management and other topics. Clients for whom I have presented workshops or addressed seminars (various topics) include:

* Health Service Executive
* Institute for Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy
* Irish Congress of Trade Unions
* Irish Dental Association
* Irish Medical Organisation
* Irish Nurses' Organisation
* Irish Vocational Education Association
* Law Society
* National Union of Journalists (Dublin & London)
* Order of Malta
* Technical Engineering and Electrical Union
* William Glasser Institute European Convention

My email address: pomorainatireland.com (change "at" to "@") My telephone number (voicemail) is: ++ 353 1 4404140

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