padraigbelton.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

First day of his summer, a Dublin six year-old sat to his German–a treatise on fire engines–as Mullingar's own @ailishtynan.bsky.social took to @wigmore-hall.org.uk's stage, Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leber. Beautiful timing even if I'm not, the next three months, quite Still im Kämmerlein.

submitted 11 hours ago • 0 comments

Dog days of summer: Garda Ruairc Courtney, yesterday at 5:30 am, after hopping into the water to rescue a border collie who had become stranded at Monkstown Pier in Co Cork. 🐶👮

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Is NASA using Napster?

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

This is an amazing photograph - the sun’s rays around Pluto, photographed from the far side by the New Horizons probe in 2015. It took 16 months for the spacecraft to transmit its 6.25 GB of data about the Plutonian system to earth, at 1-2 kilobits per second.

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

I prefer Jonathan to Taylor Swift, don’t @ me.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

I'm extremely happy the Irish Emigration Museum were able to trace my Irish relatives, and there was such yummy Guinness in the Stag's Head. 5/5, would go again. Down side: my Irish relatives were in Dún Laoghaire, wondering why I was so late home with supper.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

I’m so grateful to be able to join the @londonmarathon.bsky.social class of 2026 - which, like this coming autumn’s @nycmarathon.bsky.social, I am honoured and humbled to be able to do, with my love, for @amnesty.org 🕯️🏃

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Spending today and tomorrow going Dublin-Belfast-London-Cambridge and back, but I just saw the best little fellow ever hid something in my suitcase. Happy #FathersDay2025 to all similarly so blessed.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

I’ve now brought two babies to work with me in broadcast studios, Parliament, GCHQ, university lecturing, and interviews with countless (tech) CEOs. I wonder if I was able to get away with it so often because I’m a man. If so, this isn’t how the world should work. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Guys I’m proud parent of a silver medalist in the potato and spoon race

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

Had we but world enough and time, This large suitcase, lady, were no crime

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Of an exuberantly sun-kissed bank holiday, Carlotta has had chance of showing her kind visiting godfather George the finer arts of scooting and sand castle construction, on the Sandycove sand ☀️🛴

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Of an exuberantly sun-kissed bank holiday, Carlotta has had chance of showing her kind visiting godfather George the finer arts of scooting and sand castle construction, on the Sandycove sand ☀️🛴

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Josie Ryan, hanging out her washing in the last cottage abutting Dublin Airport in the 1980s, on Collinstown Lane. (I've just shown this beaut of a 747 in Aer Lingus 'Shamrock' livery to a six year-old Irish AvGeek who absolutely adores double-deckers.)

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

So this nine year-old girl wanted to go to the shops, to get snacks for the other children coming round to play. She has chosen: Tuscan wild boar sausage, pecorino, and … sushi.

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments

If you HAPPENED to want to force your family + friends to watch the Doctor Who finale in a cinema today - I mean, there are OPTIONS: the Oods are in your favour 🤷 Follow me for more dalektable puns. www.doctorwhoincinemas.co.uk

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

Had the absolute best morning, working on sprint starts and baton passing with schoolkids from across Tallaght, on Rhasidat Adeleke’s marvellous home track! With that gentle mist that grows new Irish Olympians…. Thanks @athleticsireland.bsky.social and the awesome kids that took part.

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

My daughter has begun calling Islington ‘Is LinkedIn’ and I can’t stop thinking about that.

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

And this little guy, all my dreams come true, helping me blow out candles at Ragazzi, after we both filled our boots at @gutterbookshop.bsky.social After five countries in five weeks, a very Baile Átha Cliath bday (and hat)….

submitted 29 days ago • 2 comments

My little girl is up at 6 am to bang out a magazine for the neighbourhood children. It has a word search, and adverts, and exclusives. And they say we don’t influence our young.

submitted 30 days ago • 3 comments

I’ve been spending a lot of time in both Ireland and Germany lately, and hear me out: black pudding schnitzel.

submitted 31 days ago • 5 comments

I’m always so grateful for the chance to go down to my local newsagents with my little guy, and show him a story by his father in the Sunday papers. (And for his part he gets chocolate out of it.)

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

1. My iPhone has suddenly decided to start autocorrecting ‘cycling’ to ‘f*cking’. Unrelatedly 2. I am organising a cycling trip.

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

One of my favorite bits of automotive research, I was reminded when I saw @padraigbelton.bsky.social's articleon lunar tires. Originally published in 2010. www.hemmings.com/stories/earl...

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

I so enjoyed talking to Nasa and the ESA for this story on reinventing the wheel for the moon and Mars. If journalists like me don’t write stories about space, schoolkids won’t want to grow up to be astronauts. And what a very sad world that would be. www.bbc.com/news/article...

submitted 41 days ago • 2 comments

Shout out to the Irish-American retiree on my London-Dublin flight, who after telling me about his McGinty great-grandmother from Inver, Donegal (which I saw coming), followed it up with a cheery Dia dhuit and slán (which I did not). People can surprise you in the loveliest ways.

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

We just asked two German girls entschuldigen bitte, wo ist das Recycling, and I feel - under the best mentorship - we are getting closer to passing our life in Germany exam

submitted 44 days ago • 1 comment

Maybe it is because I am in Paris as I get the news, but Leo Quatorze to me sounds very much like the Sun Pope….

submitted 46 days ago • 1 comment

Always such an honour to have a foreign affairs column in one of India’s largest (and, obviously, best) papers. But much more important than anything I can have to say on US and UK trade deals is to hope peace will prevail in a region I love dearly. www.hindustantimes.com/ht-insight/i...

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

Thanks so much, Scoil Mhuire Ballyboden, for letting me take a break from newsrooms to instead do relays in the sun with your amazing students. I had - yes - a relay good time...

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

First GAA training since Easter, and my little fellow wanted to bring all his remaining Easter eggs to share with his friends. 🪺😍 (Not pictured: the subsequent use of Easter eggs by his sister as a sliotar.)

submitted 51 days ago • 1 comment

Yesterday in Basel, I danced till dawn with a very dear chum, and his new bride. Tomorrow, at 7 am, I’m on a news editing shift. But this morning, I awoke in Germany’s Black Forest, to share breakfast strudel with four white storks, nested in death defying heights by my balcony.

submitted 55 days ago • 0 comments

This morning, Liam and I are in Basel, in charge of champagne and the sabre arch for his godfather Aleks’s wedding. This pleases me greatly as we have been put in charge of this wedding’s department of drinking and fighting.

submitted 56 days ago • 2 comments

I spent a year in Switzerland, after Oxford and a beastly breakup, deciding to.make myself a writer. Full circle, it’s now where my little people learn to speed down hills (and, for a little fellow who’s taken up the language, to practise his German). And the flag is a big plus.

submitted 57 days ago • 1 comment

It’s the end of ski season après in Saas-Fee - with, because of its height, the Alps’s longest ski season. (Which is why Wham filmed Last Christmas here.) Below me, a massive party, where everyone is singing along, each in their own language. And this is so unspeakably beautiful.

submitted 58 days ago • 1 comment

I’m on a car-train! (On my way to my two little people taking me for remedial ski lessons)

submitted 59 days ago • 2 comments

Walking down the street in Basel. Two little lads go by. I think to myself, that looked like a GAA top. Then I realised it was a GAA top. Their--Swiss--dad told me GAA is now huge locally, with pharma bringing heaps of Irish people here. Next time I'm bringing my sliotar.

submitted 59 days ago • 1 comment

I feel strangely targeted by the food choices at the Schiphol KLM lounge tonight.

submitted 61 days ago • 2 comments

Writing inside. Outside, I can hear my little fellow telling a neighbourhood playmate, who'd used 'gay' as an insult, that his father has good friends who are gay and it's completely normal and fine. Bursting with pride, but he's also spelling gay 'G-A-A'.

submitted 62 days ago • 1 comment

Meanwhile I've discovered Luxembourgish...

submitted 62 days ago • 0 comments

I chose our seats, and Easter companions, carefully.

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

Cathedrals are living things, breathing in spans of centuries. So it pleased me that this morning, in the place I married their mother, Carlotta and Liam sat for Easter with Dean Swift and Stella.

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments