Back on the Commute
For five years I worked from home. I live in Bonn but my office is in Cologne — about an hour door to door when the trains are behaving themselves, which, on the stretch between Bonn and Cologne, is not always a given. During Covid, like everyone else, I made the switch to remote working, and for a long time it suited me fine. The company grew, office space got tight, and I was in the building maybe three times a year — usually on the occasions someone noticed I still worked there.
It was a good arrangement. I had time for other things: running, and the Cologne Celtics. By 2023 we were moving into a new apartment and I had a young child, so the idea of an hour’s commute each way held even less appeal than usual. Swings and roundabouts. I was happy at home.
Things changed last year. The company moved into new premises — a proper building, a villa in a new location — and the expectation shifted to two days in the office per week. Hybrid working. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but I’ll be honest: it’s made me noticeably happier in my working life. I feel more connected to my colleagues, and I feel like it is the perfect mix.
The commute is about an hour and twenty minutes each way. I leave the house around 7:40 and I’m at my desk by 8:57. If I leave the office at five I can be home by 6:10, provided I catch the right bus. People at work ask me if I’m not sick of the U-Bahn, whether I’ve thought about getting a car. I haven’t. That time on the train — it’s mine. No scrolling allowed.
Two Books in My Bag
I read, mostly. You can get a solid thirty or forty minutes of reading done on a commute, and when you’re tired and just sitting there, it’s easier to stay with a book than it would be at home. I also listen to podcasts, and I’m “learning” Dutch and Spanish through apps — the inverted commas are doing a lot of work in that sentence.
At the moment I have two books in my bag. One in Irish, one in German. I tell myself every year that I want to read at least a few books in languages other than English, and the U-Bahn — a captive environment, a captive audience of one — finally makes that possible in a way that feels sustainable.
Bealach na Spáinneach
The Irish book is Bealach na Spáinneach — the third novel in Liam Mac Cóil’s An Litir series, and it’s a remarkable piece of work. The series is set in the early seventeenth century, in the years after Kinsale, the Flight of the Earls, and the beginning of the Plantations. A young man named Lúcás Ó Briain is tasked with carrying an important letter from Galway to Rome, to deliver it to Hugh O’Neill and spark another revolution. In the first book he has to get out of Galway. In the second, he passes through England with spies on his trail. In the third — which is where I am now — he’s making his way across the Continent. I’m about a third of the way through and he’s currently in Flanders. I have no idea what’s ahead of him.
What I love most about the series is the linguistic texture of it. Lúcás is a scholar, and he speaks French. He has English too, though in the second book — I dTír Stráinséartha — he encounters dialects he can’t follow, and Mac Cóil writes those conversations phonetically. As a reader, especially a tired one on a late-night commute, that’s a challenge. I’m fairly sure I missed the significance of a few exchanges because I simply couldn’t decode them. But the more I think about it, the more I appreciate what Mac Cóil is doing. There was no television in seventeenth-century England. A man like Lúcás would never have encountered the full range of regional accents the way we might today. The confusion on the page is the confusion he felt. It puts you in his position — a fish out of water, even in a language he nominally speaks.
Back in the third book, the multilingual layering goes further. There’s French in the text, and Flemish, and German. And because Lúcás encounters Irish mercenaries — huurlingen — on the Continent, Irish becomes simply another European language among many. There’s nothing strange about it in that world. It just belongs there, alongside the others. I find that quietly moving, and more than a little meaningful.
I should be honest, though: Bealach na Spáinneach is hard going. It’s around five hundred pages, and it probably demands a better level of Irish than I currently have. It can sit on my bedside table for a week before I pick it up again, because it’s always easier to reach for something in English. When I read in another language — Irish, German, Dutch — I sometimes find myself understanding the individual words but losing the thread of the story. I can see the trees but not the forest. In your first language, your brain does that work automatically. In another language, it costs more, and there are moments when I’m not quite sure I’m paying enough. But I keep coming back to it. That counts for something.
Die Gefährten
The German book is Die Gefährten — the first volume of Der Herr der Ringe. The Fellowship of the Ring.
At a structural level, the two books have something in common: a young man of no particular power finds himself in possession of something enormously important and has to carry it across dangerous, unfamiliar territory. But Die Gefährten has a rather significant advantage over An Litir in one respect — I already know how it ends.
I learned this trick during my Erasmus year, or possibly just before it: if you want to read in another language, start with a story you already know. I read the Harry Potter books in German for the same reason. When your brain doesn’t have to work hard to follow the plot, it frees up capacity to actually process the language. It makes the whole experience more fluid, more enjoyable.
I wasn’t captivated by The Lord of the Rings as books the first time I tried them. I came to the story through the films, which came out when I was around ten. The big battles, the fights — I thought Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn were just about the coolest people I’d ever seen. The scene that affected me most, though, wasn’t a battle at all. It was the Fellowship travelling by boat on the river between Lothlórien and Amon Hen, and suddenly these enormous statues rising up on either side — Isildur and Elendil, the ancient kings. It gave me a feeling I didn’t have words for at the time: the sense that this world was full, that it had existed long before these characters arrived in it, that there was more history and culture here than any single story could contain.
The books were a different matter. I tried them as a teenager and bounced off them fairly quickly. The language felt heavy, the timeline was bewildering — it takes nineteen years in the book from when Frodo receives the Ring to when he actually leaves the Shire, compared to what feels like a few weeks in the film — and the songs. Tolkien loves songs. I was not ready for the songs. I definitely wasn’t ready for Tom Bombadil.
I finally found my way in at university. I was older, I wasn’t comparing them to the films anymore, and I was listening to the film soundtrack on repeat while I read — which sounds like it shouldn’t work but absolutely did. By then I was ready to enjoy both versions on their own terms, as different things that shared a world.
A few years ago I discovered the fan audiobooks produced by Phil Dragash, and that’s how I experience the story now. He performs the whole thing — voices, songs, and all — with the film music woven in and sound effects layered throughout. It’s technically a modern production, but there’s something ancient about it too, something that feels like a storyteller in a great hall. Tolkien spent his career studying epics like Beowulf, stories that were always meant to be heard rather than read. I suspect he’d have had some feelings about the YouTube thing, but I’d like to think he might have found something to appreciate in it as well.
Recently I’ve also been watching video essays by someone my own age who is reading the books for the first time and going chapter by chapter, slowly, in depth. It’s a wonderful thing to watch — someone discovering it all without any previous knowledge, noticing things I’ve long since stopped seeing. When I was younger I always wanted to get through a book as fast as possible, to reach the ending and move on. That approach has its pleasures, but there’s something to be said for slowing down.
That, in a roundabout way, is what prompted this piece.
The Lines That Stay With You
Stories come back to you at different points in your life, and they mean different things each time. The set-pieces aren’t always what stays with you. Often it’s a single line.
Tolkien is full of them. Three in particular have been in my head lately.
The first is from Bilbo, near the end of his life: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Looking at the world lately — and you don’t need me to list what’s been happening in it — I keep returning to this. The best things I’ve done in my life haven’t been expensive. I think of a night in Dingle during my time with Hibernia College: a group of us on the beach until about four in the morning, a little whiskey, some beer, a guitar, singing. I don’t know how to explain why that particular night has stayed with me the way it has, but it has. That’s what it was: food and cheer and song. I read about certain powerful figures in the world and I sometimes wonder if they have anyone to sit on a beach with. Hoarded gold.
The second is from Faramir in The Two Towers: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” Tolkien was in the First World War. He was in the trenches. He lost close friends there, in one of the worst things human beings have ever done to each other. When I was ten, watching the battle scenes in those films, I was in awe of them. I still get goosebumps from the Charge of the Rohirrim. But I didn’t really hear what Tolkien was saying underneath all of it. I think I do now. There’s no glory in breaking things. The energy that lasts, for me at least, comes from building something with people you care about.
The third is from Aragorn, in Bree, when he first meets the hobbits at the Prancing Pony. He says: “A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.”
Aragorn in the book is somewhat different from Aragorn in the films, but what makes him a compelling figure in both is the combination: he can stand in front of armies and not flinch, and he can also be honest about loneliness. That particular kind of honesty — the willingness to say, plainly, I would like to have friends around me — seems to me like genuine strength, not weakness.
I’m in my mid-thirties now. I have a young child. Life is full and busy in the way it gets at this stage, and the same is true for everyone I know — their families, their jobs, everything pulling at their time. Sometimes, amid all of it, the simplest and most difficult thing is just to say to someone: I’d like to talk. Let’s catch up. I want to take the time. We get so caught up in our own lives, and so preoccupied with what we imagine others think of us, that we forget to just say: it would be nice to talk to you.
That, I think, is what Aragorn was saying at the Prancing Pony.
The Two Books in My Bag
So back to the U-Bahn, and the two books in my bag.
Bealach na Spáinneach: difficult, demanding, uncertain. I’m following Lúcás across the Continent without knowing what’s around each corner, working hard to hold the story in my head, giving my brain a proper workout on every page.
Die Gefährten: an old friend, read in a foreign language. A story that has followed me for roughly twenty-five years now, that I’ve encountered in different forms at different points in my life, and that still has things to say.
Both matter, in their different ways. Without new stories — without the challenge of something like Bealach na Spáinneach, a five-hundred-page novel in Irish that is genuinely at the edge of my ability — I’d be missing out on extraordinary things, and on the chance to see the world differently. And without the stories that have carried personal meaning for me over the years, I’d be missing something else: the things that keep me grounded, that remind me who I am.
The tales that stay with you. The ones that really mattered.
Oisin O Mahony Blog 
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