News Opinion

PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: Let’s not consign all old people to Ga Ga land …

By Kilkenny Now 2nd June 2020 0

We might like to think that those in the autumn of their years have never had it so good. Thanks to advancements in nutrition and medicine, not to mention those (no thanks!) elective cosmetic treatments, our picture of ageing has changed radically in the past decades. In my lifetime, life expectancy has risen from 69 […]

News Opinion

PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: Africa Rising needs your help

By Kilkenny Now 25th May 2020 Post a comment

Few corners of the world have escaped the devastation of Covid-19. One of the biggest mistruths about the rogue microbe is that it treats all its victims equally, discriminating nowhere. While people of all backgrounds and dispositions are hit by Covid-19, it is those souls in the lower socio-economic brackets who, with the elderly, are […]

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PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: Let’s not over-egg the Leaving Cert

By Kilkenny Now 18th May 2020 0

In January 1969 the Beatles made their last public appearance when they performed on the roof of the Apple building, and the 25th anniversary of the D-Day landings was a couple of days away. So too was the first landing on the Moon, Neil Armstrong’s one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind. […]

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PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus … I’m fine, honest, but I’d love a bit of human flesh

By Kilkenny Now 11th May 2020 0

Despite seven or so weeks of isolation, we are surrounded by bodies —  lone bodies, bodies from afar, bodies on your daily constitutional walk to be avoided, bodies of youths hanging out in groups, bodies in lines outside shops, bodies flattened on screens and, above all, bodies of dead loved ones, and of health workers […]

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PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: More to home-schooling than the three Rs

By Kilkenny Now 5th May 2020 0

So, the lockdown continues … with scientists now cautioning against the re-opening of schools after findings suggest children could be as infectious as adults. Studies, by the team of leading German virologist Christian Drosten — and teams at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US and the Shenzhen Centre for Disease Control […]

News Opinion

PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: Finding our other selves while living in lockdown

By Kilkenny Now 27th April 2020 0

Let’s park aside the fact that this time of living with the coronavirus ain’t going to end any time soon; that when the world emerges from lockdown it will be a different world for some time to come, in that in the coming months we might have restaurants but no music festivals, offices but no […]

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PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: A diary of self-imposed isolation. Trillions of viruses … and those boom-time rats

By Kilkenny Now 20th April 2020 0

When my younger brother and I were small, before our sister arrived into this world, and we would get one of those many childhood ailments, my mother would send for the doctor, having created a bed downstairs for whoever was laid low, by way of two armchairs facing each other, offering a temporary cocoon. The […]

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PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: A diary of self-imposed isolation. My hero Eddie and the pandemic of my childhood

By Kilkenny Now 14th April 2020 0

When I was a lad growing up in the black-and-white years of the late Fifties, there was a lad who lived in the next neighbourhood, the age as me. Me and my pals were in awe of Eddie, for he was famous. He had his picture on a small cardboard box that sat beside the […]

News Opinion

PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: A diary of self-imposed isolation. Easy riders and human kindness

By Kilkenny Now 7th April 2020 0

My deepest heart-felt thanks to all those people, of all guises, who, locally, nationally and globally have risen to the occasion and are showing, in however small or big way, that good will always prevail, triumph even. From the organised community helpers to the supermarkets putting aide shopping times for the elderly to the willingness […]

News Opinion

PAUL HOPKINS: Life in the time of coronavirus: A diary of self-imposed isolation

By Kilkenny Now 30th March 2020 0

Covid-19 crisis has been coming for some time You couldn’t make it up. Well, in truth, you could. The award-winning movie Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon. Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Gwyneth Palthrow, and which I watched for the first time at the weekend, tells of health and government officials and […]