Sir, – They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Wonderful though it was, the photograph of Frank McNally furiously hammering out copy on Shane MacGowan’s funeral beneath an ornate stairway in a Nenagh hotel (”Long day’s journey into Nenagh”, December 13th) still needed the journalist’s 700 odd words to complete the picture. But complete it he did.
From agonising over where to best position himself in the church, to his increasingly knotted stomach as he ran up against the deadline, McNally brilliantly captured the panic behind such assured “colour” pieces.
For this one-time rookie reporter it conjured up a lot of memories, right down to finding my wheels locked in the carpark after I’d finally filed the story. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL BRADLEY,
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Okinawa,
Japan.
