Here are 20 things I have learned in 20 years of writing An Irish Diary

From irishtimes.com

By Frank McNally

Deadline fears, the law of typos and becoming a master diarist are just some

It’s 20 years since I started writing this column. And no, I don’t know where the time went. But here are 20 things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Working to a daily deadline is hard on the nerves. But the sad truth is, if I didn’t have a deadline, I’d never do anything.

2. That’s because the best idea I have today is never good enough. The one I’ll have tomorrow, where there’s more time to think, is always better.

3. Contrary to the impression I may have given over two decades, there is not an Irish angle to everything. You’d be appalled how many great events have happened down the centuries, the protagonists of which did not have a single Irish great-grandparent between them.

4. Unlimited choice is a tyrant. As anchor tenant of this column, you can write about anything: it’s left entirely up to you. This is a great privilege. And a curse. Sometimes you wish the editor would tell you what to write about. Then you could blame him.

5. They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of any discipline. By rough calculation, this should have made me a master diarist sometime around 2019. I can’t say I noticed.

                                                Frank McNally at work, by the Cuban artist Brady Izquierdo

6. The condition of not having any ideas as deadline looms is like hunger: they both gnaw at your stomach in the same way. Comfort eating is an occupational hazard. Unless you take up cigarettes.

7. Not taking up cigarettes in the last 20 years is one of my prouder achievements.

8. Deadline fear never goes away. One night last week, I noticed with a panic that it was 7.30pm and I hadn’t started writing yet. This was impossibly late, barring a miracle. But I couldn’t find my editor to warn him the column wasn’t coming. So the panic deepened until I couldn’t breathe. Then I woke up. It was 3am and I’d been having that stupid dream again.

9. When you write something wrong in a newspaper, there’s often a little voice in your head trying to tell you it’s wrong. You just can’t hear it because of all the other background noise. The little voice will only make itself audible when the noise stops. This typically happens at 3am too, when your mistake has gone to print.

10. Being a columnist is incompatible with a tidy desk. I can carbon-date the layers of paper cuttings on mine, but I’m afraid to throw any out because I must have had a good reason for keeping them in the first place, even if I can’t remember. And every so often, an idea does emerge from the mulch.

11. Daily diarists have no choice but to dramatise their lives. On the plus side, this means that when something genuinely bad happens, assuming it’s not fatal, you often have the consolation of getting a column out of it.

12. There are limits to that – or should be. Jeffery Bernard wrote a long-running column called Low Life, for which his alcoholism was a professional requirement. “The longest suicide note in history” as it has been called, was probably too high a price to pay for material. Although it did inspire a hit West End play. I envy him that.

13. When you’ve written 3,500 columns, you will repeat yourself occasionally. I like to compare this with Monet’s haystacks, painted over and over in different conditions. The excuse works doubly well for me because I have written about actual haymaking on several occasions. But the light had changed each time.

14. Muphry’s (sic) Law of Typos is immutably true. If you comment in print on an interesting or amusing mistake committed by another writer, your piece will inevitably contain an interesting or amusing mistake of its own.

15. Someone once said of the housewife-columnist Erma Bombeck that, whereas others aspired to mere Pulitzer Prizes, her work won “the permanent place of honour in American life: the refrigerator door.” I’m proud to say the occasional Irish Diary has featured on fridge doors too.

16. A few have also been framed on pub walls: the Irish columnist hall of fame.

17. On any subject about which you expound in a newspaper, there is somebody somewhere who knows more than you.

18. But being corrected only adds to your education. Writing this diary four times a week for 20 years has been like doing a PhD in Irish Studies. In American universities, that would have cost me a fortune.

[ ‘O, the drenching grey weather’: Irish rain in 40 wonderful phrasesOpens in new window ]

19. Georges Simenon once claimed that “a writer has nothing to say after the age of forty”. Mickey Spillane disagreed: “If you’re singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.” I’m not sure which is correct but to paraphrase George Orwell on men’s faces at 50, I believe that after 20 years on the job, every daily diarist has the column he deserves.

20. All things considered, it beats working.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irish-diary/2026/05/19/it-beats-working-frank-mcnally-on-20-years-of-writing-a-column/ 

Mona Siddiqui’s diary: Golfers without conscience

From prospectmagazine.co.uk

A confrontation over a smashed windscreen and a meeting in Alaska got this professor of religion thinking about reconciliation and renewal 

I am about to begin a new post as professor of religion and society at King’s College, London. I see this privileged role as more than a transition from one institution (the University of Edinburgh) to another. It’s a time for renewal and a moment of self-definition. What kind of colleague do I want to be and what kind of impact can I have on an institution which has put its faith in me at this stage of my career? When you’re lucky enough to be doing what you want in life, a job doesn’t feel like a job. It is more like an extension of your personality, and moving to a new one offers a time to pause, reflect and once again appreciate how lucky you are to be paid to inspire younger minds and play a small part in the culture of learning. 

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Sometimes you have to feel a little sorry for journalists who travel far and wide to frankly see not much. When you’re hoping to break some big news and instead have to cover high-level theatrics, it must feel pointless. And so it was when international media gathered at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Anchorage for a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Our 24-hour news cycle can feel repetitive at the best of times, but much of the TV news coverage was relentless speculation about what might happen during the presidents’ meeting to discuss Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The pressure to fill airtime in this way became tedious. And when the waiting game finally came to an end in Alaska, there was little more to comment on other than a display of remarkable performativity. 

The beaming smile on Putin’s face (whose suit looked sharper than Trump’s) and the US president’s look of self-satisfaction that the whole world was once again watching him delivered little of substance for the Ukrainians and their western allies—no deal, no ceasefire and no peace. Putin received all the honours—the red carpet, the ride in the presidential limousine known as “the Beast” and a parade of spectacular bombers and jets. In the diplomatic world, where symbolism matters almost more than substance, he was calling the shots, and no doubt will be joyously spinning this meeting as an ideological victory back in Russia. 

Trump’s subsequent meeting with Zelensky and European leaders seemed relatively cordial. But it is too early to say whether a proposed meeting between Putin and Zelensky is more stalling—or the beginning of the end of this war.

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I live next to a golf course with idyllic surrounding views. Occasionally I find a golf ball in my back garden, but a couple of weeks ago one hit the front of the house, bounced off the wall and struck my car’s windscreen. The glass cracked badly. 

I went out and, seeing the golfer, called out to him. He came over to the dividing fence looking a little sheepish. When I asked him about the incident he apologised and said he would speak to his insurance company to cover the cost of the damage. His friend muttered something in his ear, and they walked away for a few minutes before the golfer returned. He told me, “my wife deals with the insurance stuff in our house, and she has said not to admit anything.” Feeling angry now with him and his wife, I asked him how he could say this, especially when he had already acknowledged responsibility for hitting the car. He apologised again but said he couldn’t do anything more, and walked away. Could I have taken it further? Probably yes, but was it worth the stress for the sake of a windscreen? By law, the golfer was liable, but I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with someone who displayed neither a backbone nor a conscience.

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I watched the coverage of VJ day and found the service of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire particularly poignant. Maybe it was because we remembered those who felt they’d been forgotten, overshadowed in history by the earlier victory declared in Europe. Or maybe, with so much death and suffering in Gaza and Ukraine, it’s difficult to imagine how you construct a path to peace now.

I don’t think we should ever glorify war because the price paid by soldiers and civilians is always too high. But even as we remember the brutality and dehumanisation which is intrinsic to all wars in ceremonies like the one at the arboretum, a lone piper’s performance at a Japanese peace garden in west London reminded us of the enduring importance of reconciliation between countries.

Among many moving moments at the national memorial, Captain Yavar Abbas, a 105-year-old veteran, went “briefly off script” to salute King Charles and thank him and the queen for being there despite Charles’s ongoing cancer treatment. There was applause and tears from many, including the king and queen, as Abbas, himself a cancer survivor, read from his diary entry dated 8th February 1945. “Tomorrow, I hope I will live to do better things,” he said. I hope and pray this is a lesson for us all.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/views/columns/70924/mona-siddiqui-diary-golfers-without-conscience