Rick O'Shea

A brand new column yesterday in the Insider Magazine in the Indo – this one on collecting crap…   Somewhere in my bedroom, underneath a cupboard is a solid, handsome ornate box my dad once bought at a car boot sale. In it, I keep some of the most precious items that I possess. Those that are irreplaceable, what would be called “items of sentimental value” if they were ever stolen. These ones won’t be stolen though, or if they are it’ll be by a very disappointed burglar. They’re stones. Pebbles. Little bits of masonry from the side of buildings […]

My new column for the Irish Independent’s Insider Magazine was yesterday, in case you missed it…   My first thought when I suggested this to my editor as a column was “how do I put this together without sounding either like I have a tenuous grip on reality or implying I have a borderline personality disorder?”  Still not sure how I’m going to do that, to be honest. Hi, my name is Rick and I’m an ambivert. I came across the word when a friend of mine (let’s call him Max for the sake of decorum) told me about the […]

I wrote my first ever column for a newspaper this week, in the Irish Independent’s Insider Magazine. If you missed getting a copy, here it is in all its shiny, stylised glory…   The first question someone asks you when you tell them that you’re trying to read a hundred books in 2014 is “are you a mental case?” closely followed by “is it a bet?”, “what’s your problem?”, “are you a mental case?” again and then usually settling on “why?” Last year I set myself the task of reading a book a week as a single, unbreakable New Year’s […]