HeyJaredMaria C. McCarthy is in her writing shed
A second-generation Irish writer living in the Medway Towns, writing about everything from memoir to music, from poetry to short fiction
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
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- Sep 24, 2026
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- Jul 16, 2026
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Finding forgiveness (opens the original)
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As we walked across the cathedral, a minister climbed into the pulpit. We sat for a few minutes while she delivered some thoughts on how we might cope with the evils of the world. She then asked us to join her in the Lord's Prayer. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ We sat in silence, the two of us, neither able to voice the prayer out loud. Both of us have been hurt by church, by religion, yet Rochester Cathedral is where we go when we are troubled. The mi
Low-level living, from prefabs to bungalows (opens the original)
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When Reg and Win returned from India, in the late 1940s, they decided to build their own home. Reg worked for Aveling-Barford, an engineering firm in Grantham, and had gone to India to help set up a factory to build road rollers. In their Lincolnshire home were framed photos of their bungalow in India, and one of Reg seated atop a road roller made in the factory he'd helped establish. It may have been the house that they lived in whilst abroad that influenced their decision to build a bungalow.
Degrees of separation and the perils of gossip (opens the original)
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Robin Tripp has left the flat he shared with Chrissy and Jo. The doors have closed for the final time on Robin’s Nest. Robin Tripp was played by Richard O'Sullivan, starring as the same character in Man About the House and Robin's Nest. The charming second-generation Irish actor has died, aged 82. Of course, he acted in other roles, but for those of us that lived in households where the telly was always on, in the 1970s, Richard O'Sullivan is forever the flat-sharer with two young women, played
August, September (opens the original)
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They emerge from perfectly round holes in the front garden, as they have done late August for four years now. I wrote about them once before on Substack: The Bees are Back. They are ivy mining bees, newcomers to our shores. They only visit a few weeks a year, disappearing late September. They now mark the end of summer and the coming of autumn as much as the sudden rush for school shoes before term begins, and the blooming of Gillingham FC replica shirts on the streets around Priestfield Stadium
The three Petes of Thames Polytechnic (opens the original)
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Pete Widdowson sways from side to side, then steps slightly backwards and a little forwards. ‘Come on, have none of you been to bed with a good Trollope?’ he says. He is lecturing on The Novel, the swaying and stepping a way to manage the pain of his gout. He has made The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy sound exciting, the epistolary novel unmissable. I guess the Anthony Trollope joke is one he's doled out to every year of the BA (Hons) Humanities students who have opted for English for the
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