There was another notable in the Forkhill area – besides the often mentioned Squire Jackson – one Captain Alexander, whose original Forkhill House home endured well into the twentieth century.
Forkhill House
John McCullagh
Banshee
Jack McCulla and Bertie Jones walked across
Orkney Butchers
A large body of Scottish troops under Major-General Robert Munroe landed in Carrickfergus on 15 April 1642 to assist in repressing the insurrection.
Johanna Legova
Dear Agnes,
It was my wife’s idea in the first place that we hire a cheap immigrant female worker to help her with the chores.
Cowboys and Indians
Another surprise for me was that boys and girls freely mingled both inside and outside the classroom, unlike in Moortown, where the sexes were rigidly segregated in different classrooms and kept apart in the playground by a high wall.
Stranger than fiction?
Picture the scene. My kitchen, here in leafy Warwickshire. Morning, between nine and ten o’clock. Sometime, mid to late nineteen eighties.
Agnes: Blue Sky Practitioner
Dear Agnes,
I might have applied for one hundred jobs without success and I’m beginning to lose hope of ever being gainfully employed. That is the reason I am applying for anything and everything. I need your help to understand just what might be expected of me should I be successful with my latest application.
The successful candidate, the advertisement read, will become a ‘Blue Sky Practitioner and will be required to undertake horizon scanning and futures research. He/she will create curve leverage systems for rapid diffusion, helping customers to articulate and understand order and chaos. Workstreams will adhere to a generic cycle based on a hypothesis-driven creative problem-solving process to initiate improvement products’.
I’m a good girl, I am, and I am not so desperate for work as to risk my chastity or reputation. Does this sound like a job that you would encourage your own daughter to accept?
Yours truly,
Verity White
Dear Verity,
It is a good rule-of-thumb that any job advertisement that is couched in meaningless, linguistic nonsense such as this requires very little indeed from the ‘Practitioner’ bar the ability to learn to talk b******t!
(Sorry for that temporary lapse. I appreciate with your upbringing you have probably never heard anyone speak so, or write thus. You quickly will, as soon as you get your first job!).
I suspect you would merely be expected like the farmer, to be ‘out standing in his own field’ .. to scan the skies, day and night for who knows what? But with who knows whom, and where, and under what circumstances, might be the more appropriate questions to ask. It is probably a task for the amateur astronomer, in search of incoming meteors or comets that might collide with Earth in the distant future. If so, and you were successful in your application, you could make it up as you go along, for there’s no one in the position to contradict you.
On the other hand, if this is a bone fide position and well-remunerated, you can be certain it was created with someone else in mind than you.
Go ahead to the interview but carry one of those anti-personnel sprays (Mace) for fear of attack. Use it anyway if your application is refused! It will serve them right for being obtuse in their intent!
Agnes Dayee
The Valley of Old
We have previously several times mentioned The Valley, the area of our town centred on Cecil Street.
Fiddler’s Green Memories
The lovely Bridin O’Hare of Rostrevor shared her images of this year’s Fiddlers Green Festival with us. Bridin is a final year Multimedia Design student at Jordanstown. Enjoy !