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Moving Day! – Home is Where the Heart Is – Episode 266

In this episode, Dara is recording for the last time at Hashtag Hilltop – he and his family are about to move for the umpteenth time in recent years. He finds himself reflecting on homes of the past and the countless and never reliable memories from all of them. It strikes him how important the idea of a shared space is. Isn’t the ability to share space a profoundly important matter for all humanity? Isn’t that ability integral to humility? And isn’t it fundamentally antithetical to capitalism?

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Staying in the room

“Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly . . . while from others the spirit slips before the body perishes.” EM Forster, Howard’s End “It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of,

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Pannonia Girls

4 Comments / Poems / Dara Clear

Pannonia Girls Eyes pools of wonder, glittering intelligence, sparkling mischief. Bodies shaped by pride, confidence and interest. Dimples and grins of gaiety and penny-dropping knowing. In the wooded space they have been given leave to grow, to be wrong, to be curious. Castles and kingdoms, and queendoms, made in dollhouses. The lash, the whip and

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The Return

12 Comments / Reaction / Dara Clear

We stand on the old stone bridge looking down at the river flowing from the mountains to the sea. The water is brilliantly clear, gushing and bubbling over the rocks and pebbles and silt with effortless onward movement. We stare patiently at the darker water that pools by either riverbank under the shade of the

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Away with the fairies

7 Comments / Reaction / Dara Clear

…home is the place of belonging. Home can also be the opposite of that, highlighting the sense of not belonging, the sense of otherness. Home then, embodies a strange paradox in that it can be understood as both happy assimilation into place and tribe as well as being one’s concept of defiance, individuality and difference.

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Tell me about it

28 Comments / Reaction / Dara Clear

Where does our desire to tell stories come from? What exactly is it that we are trying to articulate and what fuels the conviction that there is an audience for the tales we tell? It’s surely not just a by-product of ego, a desire to impose ourselves on the world, an inner compulsion towards self-assertion.

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