Author Archives: Liam Doherty

As tough times befall our little island, the likes of which we’ve not encountered since WW2, we should say a Stoic prayer: things can get worse, things will get worse, yet however bad things get, I have some small ability to make them better.

Nine degrees celsius is the present sea temperature, enough to make the uninitiated yelp upon entry (as I’ve had the sick pleasure of witnessing with several friends over the years), and more than enough to make any extremity turn white, or turn around and retreat back inside of you.

Kids will make seemingly safe devices unsafe by their innate impulse to explore and experiment, without giving it a second thought. As adults, we lose that, we give things a second thought, we see danger everywhere, where it is and where it isn’t. Kids are blind to ‘the other side’ of boundaries we adults set, they don’t foresee the negative possibilities of pushing against the boundaries, and bounding over them the second your back is turned.

After the burning blatancy of the boxing judges’ corruption cooled down for me, the performance became something greater than its result: it was Fury’s ode to bravery and boxing prowess, to the endurance and tenacity of the human spirit, despite all that went before, defying and defeating the odds which once seemed stacked against him. Indeed, a dramatic representation of humans becoming superhuman, our generation’s fight of the century: ‘The Comeback of the Century: Fury Rises’.

Wishing for all the qualities that comprise your perfect imaginary person to fortuitously manifest within a real life person, who is ‘just your type’, is a childish fancy. These sorts of games should really be abandoned at the same time you stop playing make-believe. It reduces your chances of finding and building relationships with people outside that imaginary bracket; real-life people with nonphysical qualities that actually matter, and make for healthy relationships, like honesty, loyalty, compassion, and so on.