FEAST OR FAMINE

The dairy company, Dairygold, located in Munster, Ireland, conducted a study on how people in Ireland spend the minutes in each day, on average. They conducted a national survey of over 1,000 people and asked them where their minutes go. There are 1440 minutes in a day. Here are the results: People in Ireland, on average, spend 390 minutes a day sleeping (6.5 hours), 297 minutes working (less than 5 hours a day, which doesn’t include talking with colleagues, or taking lunch breaks), 286 minutes with loved ones, 120 minutes relaxing, 58 minutes cooking, 48 minutes commuting to and from work, 40 minutes complimenting other people on their appearance,   40 minutes exercising, 38 minutes hitting the alarm snooze button, 37 minutes eating (excluding breakfast), 34 minutes being affectionate with someone (such as hugging), 32 minutes on grooming (getting dressed), and 19 minutes having breakfast. That totals 1439 minutes, so there is one minute remaining. Dairy...

Eat Him If You Like (2009) is set in rural France in the Dordogne region on 16 August 1870. It is based on a real event in history during the Franco-Prussian war. Nobleman Alain de Moneys is almost 30 years old, but still living with his parents on their estate. On this hot August day he wants to go to the fair, three days before he will fight in the war, even though the medical board exempted him from battle due to his limp leg and weak constitution. He travels on horse for the two miles to the village Saint-Roch (population 45) near Hautefaye, where there is a bustling crowd of 600 to 700 people. A mis-heard conversation is exaggerated, blown out of all proportion, and travelling fast. It stemmed from an argument about the war, when the phrase ‘Down with France!’ incites anger. There is a traitor, a Prussian, an enemy in their midst. A one-hundred person mob goes berserk. Friends become enemies, and strangers support strangers, in an irrational scene of mayhem i...

Talking To My Country (2016) is a memoir, a ‘personal meditation’ on race and identity of an Australian man of Wiradjura and Irish heritage. Stan Grant, Wiradjura man and journalist since 1987, is better known as an international reporter with CNN from 2001-2012. Grant begins his memoir with his son – taking him to the place he was raised, where his journey began – Poison Waterholes Creek. He then retraces his beginnings that commence with his grandfather in Belabula near Bathurst in Australia, and simultaneously in Moyne, County Tipperary in Ireland in 1810 with 17-year-old John Grant who is sent to Australia as a convict. Families eventually come together – a ‘forbidden love’ partnership of a Wiradjura man with a white woman. He tells of his parents’ move to Canberra in the 1970s where he began his working life. He discusses his influences – the book that changed his life – the 1953 book, Go Tell It On The Mountain by American James Baldwin, as well as the A...