AND OTHER WRITINGS
From family life to far-flung travel, this treasure trove of stories and musings captures the spirit of a life well lived. Laughter, tears, hope and sadness all feature in this beautiful book of selected writings that has something for everyone… bringing together the very essence of what it means to be human.
A new pandemic, an idiot in the White House and a tyrant in the Kremlin, a vaccine in the water turning white people black, and way too many spies for one small Irish town.
It’s 2030, and a new pandemic is sweeping America, but the black population seems to have a natural immunity to the virus. Slow-witted President Donald Daniels orders his team to urgently find a new vaccine, one that can be secretly added to the water supply to overcome a growing anti-vax sentiment.
In Boyle, in the West of Ireland, a small laboratory develops a vaccine but one of their scientists has concerns about its remote potential to turn white-skinned people black.
The concerns are ignored in the rush to get to market. As the world turns black, Russian and American spies converge on Boyle to try to get their hands on the formula for an antidote, but the canny locals aren’t easily fooled. Russian President Zhadnyy has stopped making public appearances, and Daniels wonders at the effect on property prices now that everybody could be living in a black neighbourhood.
Some people have absolutely no business being in charge. Sadly, those people are also sometimes named ‘Dad’.
A few years ago, David Diebold took the brave decision to give up a full-time job to be a stay at home Dad. Thing is, there was already a stay-at-home mum, three hairy monosyllabic teenage boys, and a pathologically cheerful, explosively hormonal pre-teen girl. What follows is a year at the coal face of parental ineptitude, a year in which David learns that helping to keep the well-oiled machine of a busy family home firing on all cylinders requires, well, oil… and a machine.
If a family of six in a rapidly degenerating house weren’t enough to contend with, there’s Molly the ancient, toothless, perpetually molting dog, hell bent on murdering the postman. Good enough reason as any to hit the wine.
It’s not all missteps and pratfalls. Amid the chaos of life, David and family must contend with the trials of teenage angst, and the death of a loved one.
Can he survive 12 months and keep his sanity? Sure. But can anyone else?
Some secrets can’t stay hidden away forever.
Kate returns to her favourite seaside village on the southern coast of Ireland to forget her past… but an island trip reveals there is more to boat rides than spotting porpoises. Unwillingly complicit in a secret, her ambitions become thwarted by a stalker who cannot be charged for his crime, threatening her new position, friendships, and romance…
From struggling actor to wannabe cook, aspiring filmmaker, and national newspaper hack, David Diebold’s unconventional life has placed him in some bizarre and precarious predicaments.
He has blagged his way onto the stage with the Kirov Ballet for an entire run of Le Corsaire without ever having danced: fibbed his way into a busy kitchen and cooked breakfast for Senator Ted Kennedy; and he has completely cocked up a job as a stripping vicar.
Strangest of all, perhaps, is the family backdrop to this rather odd journey, in which David discovered that his sister was actually his mother, and his real father, a former roadie with legendary American band Three Dog Night, who he tracked down with a private investigator, was a top movie special effects man.
By turns humorous and heartbreaking, these 52 vignettes of life, love and loss are soul-searching, searingly honest, and just plain strange…