Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

If your taxi driver had  been awake for the guts of 57 hours, would you be happy to let him drive you home? No?

What about if your doctor had been awake for 57 hours – would you let them take out your appendix?

Didn’t think so.

Sunday Business Post, August 07, 2005

Working around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine – how long can Ireland’s over-worked junior doctors keep going under these conditions? ‘You wouldn’t want your mother or fathe r on that operating table,” says the junior doctor, yawning down the phone. [Read more →]

Every now and then you do a piece that catches you in the throat. This piece stemmed from an interview with a blogger who was tackling some intensely personal stuff on his blog about his own self-harm, which he has now ditched as he has stopped harming. Result.

Sunday Business Post – Jan 26, 2006

John cuts himself. He takes a razor blade, draws its edge slowly across his upper arm until it parts the skin and glides smoothly, steely into the soft flesh beneath. He says that when he sees the blood, it feels good; it feels like the sting of sunburn and a release of pressure. [Read more →]

Beginning of day one of horse trek: Happy face. End of day two of horse trek: Sorry arse. This is the story of a silken-assed young city boy, the ghosts of some famous cowboys, and a feisty ride called Cynthia. (Sounds like a night in Coppers).

Sunday Business Post, September 23, 2007

There’s a certain comfort in some of life’s old reliables, the things you can count on staying the same when all else goes haywire. Yesterday will always be better value than today, and night will always follow day. In the travel world, backpackers will always blindly follow the highlights list in the front of guidebooks but claim they’re trailblazing pioneers.

Most of the trails in the world were well blazed long ago, of course, but a few still lie relatively unbeaten and not far from the main bottlenecks in South America’s backpacking logjam. Notorious highwaymen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hit them in the early 1900s when they hung up their outlaw spurs in search of an honest life. They didn’t want to settle somewhere well signposted, so they headed for the isolated plains of Bolivia. [Read more →]

Having taken a step back from blogging and all that ‘meta jazz’ for a while, I’ve had a good long think about the Social Media Guru (SMG) vid I put together in September, and what motivated me to be so cynical. The video is the only web ‘thing’ I’ve ever really created, it has generated 143,000 hits and counting. That’s unexpectedly large given what it was (ten times the hits of the much-vaunted DJ Hip Op vid), yet infinitely small in Youtube terms (20 million people have watched this surprised kitten video).

It sparked some pointed animosity from American SMGs, already sick of being mocked, despite the video being aimed squarely at their clients, whose gullibility and laziness of mind is the root of the real issue. One full-on viral case study was done on its global spread, which was very interesting indeed.  The video was met largely with a wall of silence by those in the sector in Ireland, in comparison which is unsurprising due to the small marketplace here.

I’m not a guru or a techie, I’m not selling any guru-like services (at present), but I have helped friends get started in the sphere and written copy for plenty of websites. I’m also a chronic lurker. [Read more →]

Ah, the wireless. Sure where would you be of an aul winter evening without the magic box in the corner?

I’d spent a long time looking for this old radio documentary I cobbled together for a college project when, finally, it appeared in an old clippings folder.

It’s an interview with my dad’s aunt Peggy, a Loreto sister who spent 43 years in Kenya with the order as a teacher. She crossed paths with Mother Teresa and taught a child who ended up winning a Nobel peace prize. Not a bad lifetime’s work.

I’ve started doing some podcasts for another website, and thought I’d throw this one up here for the record. Enjoy.

Peggy

Last week I took a bunch of college students back to school. After three hours of poker, I stood up and walked away with 70 of their softly-bludged euros. It was a rare, rare win.

While I was busy fleecing them, we got talking about work, and the fact that I’m back freelancing again. The lads started asking me about what articles I most enjoyed researching. I’m not a big poker player, but when I mentioned a long feature on student poker, and promptly scooped another hefty pot of chips, there was a collective groan. He’s a fucking shark.

The article appeared on the front of the Agenda magazine while I was still a student myself.

Sunday Business Post, Feb 27, 2005

Poker School

It’s 7.30pm and the last of 270 students are trickling through the doors of the Gresham Hotel. Ten to a table, they sit and make guarded small talk, eyeing each other nervously.

With a top prize of €1,500 on the line, there’s little time for making friends, and everyone is anxious to get down to business. Niall Hughes of Trinity College’s Card Society announces to much applause, that the prize fund has reached €6,500. [Read more →]

This was one of the hardest articles I ever chose to write. My mum (pictured) had a short but intense battle with MS in her mid-forties, which she ultimately lost. I paired up with Damien Mulley, who had been diagnosed recently, to write about our experiences of the condition. It’s heavy.

I wrote this six months after my father died, and some people remarked that it was an article I could never have written while he was alive, given the situation it describes. It doesn’t attach any blame to him for his response, but it would have been….awkward. And as for the motives behind it – I don’t know. Therapy, I guess. It’s still hard to re-read, and seeing it in print was much harder than the process of writing it, which I undertook pretty much on autopilot. I picked up a copy of the paper and went into a coffee shop to read it that day, and nearly collapsed when I saw the pictures of my mother in the paper. Anyway, here it is:

Sunday Business Post, September 07, 2008

MS, which attacks a person’s nervous system, directly affects more than 6,000 people in Ireland. Diagnosis often prompts a frenzy of research, as the new patient scrambles to arm themselves with as much information as they can. Often, the first stop is someone whose life has already been affected by MS.

For Cork-based journalist Damien Mulley, diagnosed this January, his first port of call was a fellow journalist, Markham Nolan, whose mother died in 2004 after an unusually brief time with the illness. Here, they share their very different perspectives on a condition that is a familiar presence in thousands of Irish homes. [Read more →]

It’s not easy to like a man who says things like that. Even less when he fills a book with similar throwaway phrases and sundry self-aggrandising sop, and you have to read the whole thing and turn in a review at the end.

I like reading books. I count book reviews as a perk of working in journalism, but this death row lawyer-cum-author made me want to fly to Texas just in the hope I’d get to punch him.

Sunday Business Post, January 31, 2010

David R Dow, the high profile death-row lawyer responsible for Killing Time: One Man’s Race to Stop an Execution, would have us believe he is among the highest ranks of legal martyr. His job is, after all, an endless moral conflict. [Read more →]

I’m no festivalgoer. All that mud, all those drunks. It’s not my bag, not in the hardcore sense, at least. I drove to Oxegen and drove home Saturday night, rather than have my head stepped on in my sleep, or have to brush my teeth with the end of a flagon of Linden Village. But a festival in the Sahara has a certain appeal. Gimme a cotton tent, some rebellious desert nomads, a few hundred camels and toilets with no water and I’m all set.

Sunday Business Post, February 20, 2005

For the smug, self-satisfied world traveller, nothing brings on a smile like a heavily-stamped passport. Above that, the greater goal is stamps that say ‘I’ve been there and back’ on the road less travelled. The trump of all passport stamps must be that inked in the fabled city of Timbuktu. [Read more →]

I’m taking a few weeks off dealing with blogging and all that ‘meta’ jazz to deal with a busy time in the real world of tangible stuff. Debts, deadlines and numbers that mean more than hits.

Talk amongst yourselves for now. I’ll be back soon with treats.