Quentin "Q"
Fottrell is an unlikely Agony Uncle.
A writer and sometime disco-dancer, Quentin comes from an ever-expanding 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 been running with his ballpoint pen ever since, contributing 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. After a five-year stint in London, he decided to turn his back on the rat race and return home: “From my school days, where I was either too giddy or too talkative, to my professional life, where I carried a business card with the same pride as if I were about to donate a kidney, my working life had been one long treadmill.”
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With that in mind, Q studied acting at Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting and London’s Central School of Speech & Drama, and even tried his luck (not to mention his audience’s patience) as a stand-up comic in London. At his debut, he said it was ages since he was on a date: “The movie we saw is now a classic, despite the fact it’s been colourised.” The crowd sat stoney-faced, so Q tapped the microphone: “Is this thing on?”
His travelogues for newspapers in Ireland and the U.K. have taken him from a nightclub in Savannah with The Lady Chablis to trekking in the northern hills of Thailand. On Bangkok’s sex industry: “A hornet’s nest of tuk-tuk drivers gathered on my street one morning, buzzing around pale, wide-eyed tourists. ‘I take you to nice lady,’ one told me. It was too early for elevenses, although I could have murdered a cup of tea.”
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 World Weary, a forum for the magic, the chaos and, of course, the mini-dramas. In the meantime, he grapples with the little things that are sent to test us — like a patron’s mobile phone going off during a marvelous production of Waiting for Godot. As always, Q tried his best to look on the bright side: “Maybe he was calling to say he got stuck in traffic.”
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