December 2018 – A musing Mulcahy

Lessons from the Gruffalo

I read quite a lot – for work, for education and for pleasure. Not as much in the last category any more, and less overall than I used to, but there are still a few fiction titles every year, usually in the “damn near brain-dead/guilty pleasure” category. There are very, very few books that I read hundreds of times. The Gruffalo is the only one this year.

It’s probably obvious that I have a young child – the Gruffalo isn’t a religious text, or a set of instructions for life. But there are lessons in it, and the reading of it, just the same. Continue reading “Lessons from the Gruffalo”

A debt owed to my father

(An edited version of this piece appears in “Salmon of the River Lee”, a recently published ode to the river by Dan O’ Donovan. It’s a lovely book, with countless hours of research between the covers, and is available online

from www.anglebooks.com and www.rareandrecent.com.)

I’m a fair to middling (some might say mediocre) salmon angler. I tie my own flies to a reasonable standard, and can cast a decent line with a single-handed rod, or a fairly poor one with the double-hander. My father, Ger Mulcahy, known to friends and acquaintances in Cork as Gerald, was (I have been told) by contrast, an excellent fly-fisher of salmon. My first salmon on the fly on the River Lee in Cork was on a stretch of water he knew well and fished often, and I felt he was there on the Graveyard stretch that day.

Continue reading “A debt owed to my father”

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