Bridget McNulty

I was walking along the beach in Durban not so long ago when the strangest thing happened to me. Well, one of the strangest. One of the strangest in a long while, anyway. It was one of the main beaches — Dairy, I think, or Bay, and there were loads of people about. I seem […]

I’ve been bedridden for two days with a delightful combination of flu and exhaustion. This has been an interesting experience for me not only because I’m usually (very) active, but also because my landlord and -lady (an archaic set of terms if ever there was one!) called in garden services to massacre my little garden […]

Now, you might want to dismiss this as the ramblings of a 25-year-old woman who likes dressing up fancy and baking cakes a little too much, but hear me out. I had a tea party yesterday evening (in the balmy dusk air, under a tree, with two kinds of cake and homemade biscuits and sandwiches […]

… but I’m really not okay with not having another first kiss. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in the happiest relationship I can imagine, I wouldn’t want to be single and the thought of prowling clubs for a half-decent guy fills me with cold dread. But that moment! That just-before-a-first-kiss moment! That instant when you […]

There is a road I drive along frequently whenever I’m in Durban — a road that cuts through a squatter camp and passes a number of makeshift roadside stalls (hairdresser, general store, butchery) and a glut of fast-food joints (Nando’s, KFC, Chicken Licken). I was stopped at a traffic light last time I was in […]

I was at the Rocking the Daisies festival in Darling this past weekend, and I couldn’t help noticing how many men in stupid hats were strolling around without any semblance of shame. Tell me, menfolk of South Africa, is this some kind of latent desire that only creeps out in places of loud music and […]

In the days before mass communication and globalisation and extremely fast air travel turned our world into a shoebox (metaphorically speaking, of course) it was easy enough to be master of your domain. Kill a few wild animals. Perfect the art of the slow-cooked pheasant. Tell a particularly good fireside tale. Hell, even make fire […]

So I’ve had me an epiphany. A three-week-old epiphany, but when epiphanies come a-knocking I don’t like to refuse them. Instead of rabbiting on about life and love and everything else (which is, in fact, what I do on my daily blog — www.blog.bridgetmcnulty.com), I’m going to stick to my word (or words, in my […]

I’ve realised that my writing all centres around one core obsession: why people act the way they do. I was quite aware of it before, but this week I’ve been interviewed (lah-di-da!) at length about my novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, and the one topic that kept resurfacing is this fascination with why people act the […]

To all those struggling writers out there, desperately sipping cups of cold coffee and dregs of red wine, smoking cigarettes until the ashtrays overflow and typing furiously until 3am, I have a message of hope: the dream is true. And to all those un-exotic writers waking up at a reasonable hour and studiously sitting down […]