With short stories and essays from writers across Ireland working in a breadth of styles and genres, dipping into An Alternative Irish Christmas is much like helping yourself to another plate at the Christmas Eve Buffet. Just one more plate of literature, please. I’m still thinking about how good that last story tasted. I’ll have another, and if nobody else is going to finish it off, then I’ll give it a go. It is all quite enjoyable until you are betrayed by the buffet hiding heartbreak and good endings between the condiments. A Christmas walk it’ll be then, to harbour resentment for all the truths between the pages, and how well they were written. 

As you turn the page, and tell yourself you’ll rejoin the social festivities shortly, this anthology has a protective function too. There is no such thing as the perfect Christmas, and this collection reminds us that we might be foolish to plan for such. There are few experiences that make me feel more human than Christmas does, but reading An Alternative Irish Christmas, did just that. After the weeks of consumerism and buying one present for someone else, alongside one present for me too, I felt human again.

With short stories and essays from writers across Ireland working in a breadth of styles and genres, dipping into An Alternative Irish Christmas is much like helping yourself to another plate at the Christmas Eve Buffet. Just one more plate of literature, please. I’m still thinking about how good that last story tasted. I’ll have another, and if nobody else is going to finish it off, then I’ll give it a go. It is all quite enjoyable until you are betrayed by the buffet hiding heartbreak and good endings between the condiments. A Christmas walk it’ll be then, to harbour resentment for all the truths between the pages, and how well they were written. 

As you turn the page, and tell yourself you’ll rejoin the social festivities shortly, this anthology has a protective function too. There is no such thing as the perfect Christmas, and this collection reminds us that we might be foolish to plan for such. There are few experiences that make me feel more human than Christmas does, but reading An Alternative Irish Christmas, did just that. After the weeks of consumerism and buying one present for someone else, alongside one present for me too, I felt human again.

The book I decided upon won’t sound much cheerier but I promise you, it is far more hopeful than its plot summary suggests. Heartburn by Nora Ephron follows the fallout of Rachel Samstat, a food writer, discovering that her husband Mark Feldman, a political journalist, had an affair with a mutual acquaintance while Rachel was seven months pregnant with the couple’s second child.

Despite coming out over forty years ago, Heartburn still feels as relevant and applicable as ever – please consider Lily Allen’s new album about the misdeeds of David Harbour, or the world of Wicked where Ethan Slater left his wife shortly after the birth of their first child. Wages may have stagnated and house prices may have soared, but men abandoning their wives in wildly inappropriate circumstances remains a steadfast tradition.

A huge part of the novel’s enduring appeal is Ephron’s narrative voice. She writes with a familiarity that feels conspiratorial, as if she’s not just your closest friend but someone who’s taken up residence inside your head. The pain underlies her humour, which is still as fresh and striking as a paper cut. The language is pared back but always astute in its observation. It is written with great emotional honesty which verges on bluntness but doesn’t feel hard-hearted, rather it leaves you feeling armoured against the world.

I read Heartburn during the worst of the mould poisoning and whilst it was primarily the antibiotics, steroids and inhalers that made me feel better, Nora Ephron certainly helped. There is something really comforting about how Ephron created such a sense of hope from the most unlikely of circumstances and offered a reminder that life will always go on.

Jeremy Wade, ‘explorer and extreme angler’, is near 70 now – lean, white-haired, bleached and tide-marked, looking like a length of knotted mono-filament.  His pursuit of monstrous and sometimes unknown fish predates the TV show – they just follow him around while he stands like a stork in the Mekong in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning playing about his rod tip, or hunched over in a boat trying to budge a giant stingray that has clamped itself to the Amazon riverbed, like trying to pull the plug out of the sea.  (When he finally beaches it, it is obscene, a cross between an enormous rubber shower mat and a filthy puddle.  He offers it a raw leg of pork, which it spears with a sting covered in necrotic venom.  It’s the way it does it, curling first to get all its weight behind the strike.  With malice.)

This time he’s after a Goliath Tigerfish in ‘the most inaccessible part of the most inaccessible river on earth’: the Congo.  A girl playing in the water has disappeared, a man standing up in boat has been killed by a fish that leapt out of the water and bit him in the throat.  Such is the Grimm’s fairytale nature of the format.  Jeremy will hunt the monster, catch it and… study it.

He’s been in Botswana for weeks now, fishing every hour.  Three times he’s hooked something big and strong and fast; three times it has spat out his treble hooks and wire trace ‘with contempt’.  He begins to wonder if this thing is real or mythological.

Jeremy goes to see the ‘féticheur’, priest of the area, who performs rites and gives him a charm both to catch the fish and protect him from it.  Normally you’d be worried about the white gaze here but Jeremy just wants to catch the thing and every angler is a shaman anyway, standing on the boundary of two worlds with a twitching wand.

The very next day he gets into one and manages to pull this thing out -- out of the Pleistocene, out of Ted Hughes’s unconscious, an aquatic Nosferatu out of Death’s nightmares.  Fred, Jeremy’s boatman for the past weeks, gets a rope around its tail and they lift it up.  It’s like a piranha the size of a rottweiler and you can’t take your eyes off its fangs; yellow, six inches long and gnawing the air with hatred.  Jeremy needs to hold it up in the shallows until it has recovered from the fight; in this state if he lets it go it’ll get bashed against the rocks.  But, if it recovers fully, it could take his arm off.

Fred asks him when he’s going to kill it.  Jeremy says he doesn’t do that.  Fred says it was given by god, with the help of the féticheur, with the help of the people of the nearby village.  They all should have some of its flesh.  It would make them happy, Fred says.  He’s being diplomatic.  But it’s agonising for Jeremy; he’s a westerner who studies fish, not someone who feeds themselves from the river.

They stand there, holding it, Fred looking in the opposite direction now.  Then the strangest thing happens.  It turns on its side and dies.  Jeremy is left holding the brute fact of this dead fish.

He hoists it onto his shoulder and carries it into the village.  People come out and cheer – most of them have never seen one but they’ve certainly heard of it.  They slap the fish’s sides, take it from him and hold it aloft.  It ends with one of the villagers working the double hinge of its jaw, the dead fish still gnashing as the shot creeps in.  I’m scared to go to sleep now.

Reading 10 of the 11 Criminal volumes in one capacious gulp was simply the purest pleasure I had in reading this year. These comics are exactly what you want from a series called Criminal; clockwork plots, dynamic if broad characters — think names like ‘Tracy Lawless’ — and a large underworld’s whose shared history blooms through each progressive volume, despite each being enjoyable and digestible as a standalone caper.

Their most recent volume, this year’s The Knives, follows four of the series’ best characters in an interconnected series of stories. My favourite of these involve a cat burglar repeatedly breaking into the apartment of the city’s major crime boss not to steal anything, but to prank him.

Amazon Prime have an adaptation ready to release for an early binge next year — but do yourself a favour, and pick up at least one comic first. Satisfaction awaits. 

It told the story of a woman, Marjorie, who imagined herself in Irish mythology to rid of her oppressive reality. 

When I walked in, I felt immersed in the world of the play. What was so brilliant about this particular piece was the use of space. Actors greeted us at the door, leading us to our seats, and they came up the stairs, breaking the fourth wall and spoke to us, the audience. It was creative and unafraid to break conventions. 

It worked smart. The set design, the costumes. The whole play truly showed what theatre makers can do. And that in my eyes, is what theatre should be about. It isn’t about costly sets, or large Proscenium arch. It isn’t about traditionalism and going with ‘safe’ options. It’s about taking risks, telling stories that need to be told, and indeed creating something brilliant.

This production reminded me what it’s all about. Theatre isn’t set in stone, theatre is like Marjorie’s fate, it’s all about taking hold of your own narrative.