‘In the magic little window onto the mayhem of our daily lives that is Diary of a Wimpy Dad, it is as though there has always been Molly, as though she is somehow the very manifestation of our perfect imperfection; loud and messy and crazy and funny and utterly, unconditionally loved’ We’re not the perfect…

It turns out the only working public phone in all Los Angeles is 300 feet underground, stuffed with rubbish and guarded by a sleeping man smelling like a urinal full of petrol. HONESTLY, I shouldn’t be allowed out of the house, let alone 8,000 kilometers away to Los Angeles where, when last heard from, I…

At 2am on a soggy morning at Malin Head, the most northerly point on the Irish mainland, three mates began a grueling cycle south to raise money to help Leukemia sufferers. It was never going to be easy and sometimes cycling was the least of it, but it’s an experience none of them will forget. And…

It’s said that the Czechs and Irish are mirrors of the same soul – and I liked what I saw in the looking glass in both Prague and Brno SUNSET in the Golden City, the city of a thousand spires, Prague. Resting place of the Kings of Bohemia, birthplace of the Velvet Revolution; a maze…

There’s probably very little that’s healthy about a big, blow-out breakfast – one of those mid-morning, mostly weekend affairs with creaking platters of bacon, sausages, eggs and slabs of fresh French toast sprinkled with powdered sugar, pitchers of juice and steaming pots of fresh-ground coffee. It’s not terribly good for the heart, in a coronary…

I’M guessing that, like me, a lot of people have a ‘happy place’ they sometimes visit in their heads, and that when the shutters come down, on some horrible train commute say, surrounded by people who, like us, hate counting down the precious, increasingly finite days of their existence feeling like an extra in someone…

‘Israel may be known as the Holy Land and famous for its ancient relics, but it’s the food markets and restaurants and the people in them that will make a true believer of the most skeptical. It’s ‘ben zo-naaaah!’ as they say here with a big grin and an extravagant snap of the fingers…’ In the…

This city oozes authenticity. It gets in through your pores and dances a howling flamenco through the senses. It’s the real deal.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the former Soviet Baltic state. It’s not cold, it’s not grim, the food is good and the people of the relatively small university city of Kaunas (population 297,000, Belfast by comparison has 333,000) are bright, young and cheerful, and ready to party.

How nice it would be to have the luxury at the end of a day’s shopping or after a show, instead of heading for the bus queue, train or taxi, to be able to nip up a side street past the doorman with his top hat, through a gleaming revolving door and in minutes be stretching out on crisp, clean sheets. It more than changes your perspective of the town in which you live and work, take it from me, it can turn the world on its axis. And the Westbury is the perfect hub.

To paraphrase one of Simon and Garfunkel’s all time greatest and most evocative songs, one about chasing dreams along highways, about junk food and strangers, Greyhound buses, strange new cities and homesick nostalgia for small towns in big states, we had all come to look for America.

It is truly gobsmacking. I can’t believe how exhilarated we feel, how rosy cheeked and hungry we are when we get back to our holiday home later and spark up a turf fire before tucking into a bacon joint from the shop around the corner, how our whole family chatters cheerfully together about our day when normally the kids would be at each others’ throats over whose turn it was on the PlayStation.

LOOKING out over this bustling city of broad squares and narrow streets from the rooftop of the quaint Hotel Lisboa Plaza, tasty petiscos – Portugal’s version of tapas, in hand and head swimming pleasantly from a glass of strong, welcoming Madeira wine, it’s difficult to visualise the apocalyptic horror of it all.