20
“Only a small crack… But cracks make caves collapse.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
*
Nothing reflects those months of numbness, those months of almost coma, like my total selfishness. Foot and mouth came and went with barely a dent in my perception. I look back now and go,
“What the hell were you thinking?”
A British election was due on 7 June, and Tony Blair’s tooth-ridden smile was everywhere. It registered zip on my radar. A time there’d been, I could have named the members of the houses of parliament and actually followed the House of Commons debate.
Now, I barely knew the Oireachtas. I did notice Des O’Malley had been canonised in a TV series. Haughey got blasted, but what was new in that? I caught a glimpse of him, shaken and frail, emerging from a car and the crowd chucking coin
