Rick O'Shea

Sadly, this is my final column for Insider Magazine as the current edition was the last. You can read all the old ones HERE. Perhaps you will consider the following sweeping generalisation of a question – why don’t men get massages? I don’t mean manly sports rubdowns because you’ve torn something unpronounceable playing rugby or to fix that thing you twinged going on that grueling 10k run up a mountain, I mean massages purely for enjoyment. The idea only really hit me full on last weekend when I was in a spa with my other half staring off into the […]

  Losing your first love is never easy. You’re a teenager, you want to spend all your time together, everything seems new and the possibility of your future life limitless. You can’t imagine why you would ever go your separate ways. Then it happens, you’ve drifted apart and hanging around with each other gets to be a bit of a chore. It’s only just happened to me. I think it’s over. I don’t want to go to cinemas anymore. I know this might sound like I grew up in a Hovis ad set in the 20s, but when I was […]

It’s very sweet of you but there’s no need to ask, I’ve already decided. For Christmas this year I want a death watch. “Tikker” does just as you would expect it to: you enter some basic details about your age, vital statistics, health and habits and it calculates the estimated date of your death based on the information it’s been given. Then, in a presumably not unexpected turn of events, it starts counting downwards. It’s brilliant – what would happen if we all had a little digital display on our arms showing just how much time we had left before […]

My wife came up with an idea recently about the Goldilocks Zone for gigs. The idea that you’re still young enough to pass unseen in the crowd at Ed Sheeran or a festival but old enough not to look like the weird young lad at the National Concert Hall, The Abbey Theatre or a Tony Bennett concert. She thinks I’m still within the boundaries; I love testing a good theory. To start with, you should know I have a slightly unusual history of going to gigs. I went through a real Benjamin Button phase when I was a kid because […]

  Men of Dublin, please feck off and stop growing beards. Thanks. You mean I have to fill this with another 800 words and in some way explain myself? Apparently that’s the difference between good old-fashioned standing in the street and yelling stuff at randomers and having a national newspaper column. Fair enough. Once, beards were a sign of radical left-wing politics, a love of folk music, an earth loving hippy sensibility or not giving a shite about your personal appearance. Occasionally all of the above. These days it’s like pregnant women. You don’t notice one for ages until someone […]

Imagine for a microsecond you’re in a house in another country for seven full days. Just you and your partner with no TV, no internet and no other people. You put your watch away in a drawer and don’t know what time it is shy of guessing where the sun is in the sky. You have no idea what’s going on anywhere in the outside world and your phone is switched on once a day for 2 minutes just to make sure there are no  family emergencies. Other than that it’s just quiet, calm, isolation and, to all intents and […]