Emmet Mcelhatton

1 week ago | wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton

Even as I write these opening words, already I have the uneasy feeling that completing this column is going to require an act of conjuring rather than composition. Sleep deprived and suffering from a possible case of mild sulphur poisoning, I do not know if I have the mental wherewithal to pull a rabbit out of the hat this week. Instead, it might be a matter of dropping the bucket into the well and seeing what comes out.

2 weeks ago | wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton

I first laid eyes on her in a dusty, crowded room down a noisy side-street in the Imperial City of Hue, Vietnam. There were hundreds of others like her, but, with her olive skin, long neck, hour glass body, gentle voice and six silver ears, I knew she was the one. Let us start with a confession: When I initially entered, I did not notice her at first. Her humble beauty was half-hidden beneath a cheap plastic coat caked in a film of urban filth.

3 weeks ago | wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton

I’m sitting in a big bus station watching a man dressed in a military jacket aggressively, and seemingly unnecessarily, direct traffic in-and-out of the premises, and it’s doing my heart good. Slowing down as we approached the station, which looks more like an aircraft hangar than a bus depot, I first caught sight of him. Or should I say, he first imposed himself upon me.

4 weeks ago | wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton

This week I’ve been in Cambodia, a country that, though focused on the future, is trying to redress the balance between two distinct sides of its history: an ancient past that it is proud of and a recent one that it is haunted by. When you say you’re visiting South East Asia, generally people are excited for you. “That’ll be some experience,” they say with a congratulatory slap on the back, before jauntily reminding you to watch out for drink-spikers, card-skimmers and men dressed up like women.

1 month ago | wearetyrone.com | Emmet Mcelhatton

I have been sitting in this chair no longer than the time it takes to enter a password and open a blank document, but already I am getting it tight. Now, I know what you are thinking: ‘McElhatton’s lost it! Ha! Doubt he’d a touch of the Samsons about him, the baldy wee boor.’But to make such a comparison would be as wrong as it would be rude.