Search Results for 'Mary Shelley'

How about this for revenge? A man dumps his wife for a younger model. Wife appears quite civilised about it. But just as ex is about to go off on a classy holiday with new model she asks him to check out an old property she is thinking of buying. It’s in an awful state, but she needs him to trip a switch on the meter box in the tiny space under the stairs so she could check the lights on each floor. It will only take him a minute. Its a small space, and she is wearing a tight skirt and hates spiders.

EDGAR ALLEN POE’S The Fall Of The House Of Usher imagined a dwelling place which contained a dark secret that overwhelmed and destroyed its owner.

In the midst of our miserable weather, and dire financial troubles the series of ‘unfortunate’, or at least most unusual, events continued last year. Stringing them all together, as Dr Kieran Hickey does in his interesting book* reminds us that little old Ireland, blessed and loved by the saints, a ‘nation cradled in the arms of St Patrick’ (as I was taught in national school), is, alas, not excluded from strange geophysical events such as extreme weather conditions, including volcanoes and earthquakes, as we may have once believed. Although it was extremely rare for all these events to happen in the same year, I am sorry to say that having spoken to Dr Hickey this week, we’d better batten down the hatches, and prepare for a worse walloping to come. Just over 200 years ago the weather gave Mary Shelley monstrous dreams...but more of that in a moment.

It is the end of a long, tiring day. You turn out the lights and settle down for a good night’s sleep.