barbaric genius

“When soldiers got back from Vietnam, they got debriefed. Well, my head was like a warzone. But who was going to debrief me?”

The council flat is a modest affair. There’s a yoga poster on the wall and a laptop computer sitting open on a desk. The living space otherwise is frugal almost to the point of ostentatiousness. The thin, white-haired man who answers the door still has the rolling gait of a boxer, which he was in his youth, several lifetimes ago now.

In the early 1990s, the press dubbed this man a “smiling psychopath” and he was shunned by polite society. But at 67, whatever menace he once exuded has long since faded. As he fills the kettle to make tea, he seems a pretty unremarkable London-Irish pensioner. Actually, he is anything but. Read the rest of this article here.

Published: Irish Times, January 10 2011

“When soldiers got back from Vietnam, they got debriefed. Well, my head was like a warzone. But who was going to debrief me?”

The council flat is a modest affair. There’s a yoga poster on the wall and a laptop computer sitting open on a desk. The living space otherwise is frugal almost to the point of ostentatiousness. The thin, white-haired man who answers the door still has the rolling gait of a boxer, which he was in his youth, several lifetimes ago now.

In the early 1990s, the press dubbed this man a “smiling psychopath” and he was shunned by polite society. But at 67, whatever menace he once exuded has long since faded. As he fills the kettle to make tea, he seems a pretty unremarkable London-Irish pensioner. Actually, he is anything but. Read the rest of this entry »