Quentin "Q"
Fottrell is an unlikely Agony Uncle.
Quentin ''Q'' Fottrell comes from a Catholic family in a leafy suburb of Dublin. He is the fifth child, hence his name. After majoring in Psychology at University College Dublin, he switched to Journalism at University College Galway and has contributed to a variety of newspapers and magazines in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S.
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He has written on everything from the ups-and-downs of the Irish stock market to the ups-and-downs of getting older, and has written extensively about gay civil rights, consumerism and popular culture for The Sunday Tribune and The Irish Times newspapers, among others. Q studied acting at Dublin's Gaiety School of Acting and London's Central School of Speech & Drama, and even tried his luck as a stand-up comic in London. |
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His travelogues for newspapers in Ireland and the U.K. have taken him from a nightclub in Savannah with The Lady Chablis and Sea Island in Georgia to trekking in the northern hills of Thailand and hiking around the outback of Northern Ontario in Canada.
But one of his most memorable experiences involved a visit to Weimar, Germany where he met an ex-inmate of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, who had returned to the place of his imprisonment for the first time in 50 years: "The man recalled, 'I must have had angels looking after me.' His eyes, however, gave him away. They were two deep whirlpools of tears, reddened with age and inflamed by painful memories."
On safari in South Africa, Q found sweet inspiration in a lonesome chameleon: "I held it up against my jumper and it turned blue, then green. The ability to change colour in this troubled land is a rare talent, indeed."
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, he also found hope in post-war Sarajevo. "Before dinner, the Muslim call for prayer rang out across the city, echoing above the Austro-Hungarian houses, Jewish synagogues, Catholic and Orthodox churches and Turkish mosques."
From such experiences, both professional and personal, came WorldWeary.com, and his non-fiction love travelogue, Love In A Damp Climate: The Dating Game, Irish-Style, published by Currach Press, which chronicled the massive social changes in Ireland over the last half-century and the one part of our lives that would abide during both the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis that followed: our personal relationships.
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