Gerald Michael Anderson

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I came across a speech that Oscar Wilde gave on 17 March 1882. He was aged twenty-seven and on a lecture tour of North America. He participated in the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations that were organised in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Like Gerry, Oscar rarely veered into patriotism or politics. He…

Hail Glorious St. Patrick! For many of us, St. Patrick’s Day is the day we wrap up in green and flock to local parades to watch blue-kneed, curly-wigged Irish dancers display their talents in front of the judges’ podium (the back of a container lorry). And marching bands bring colour and a sense of occasion…

Rich Pickings There are rich pickings indeed in the Belfast Telegraph column that Gerry wrote over the years – Life According to Gerry. I delight in browsing through the articles and losing myself in the reveries that they offer. In each one, he leads me down various meandering paths that somehow get tied together at…

Every year it was the same. The conversations would start at the Christmas table: I could do with a wee holiday, you know….. And our response would be to tell Dad to stop talking about it. That we hadn’t even gotten Christmas Day over. Or it was far too early in the year to start…

It’s important to know who you are… who your people are, and where you come from to give you context, grounding and identity. For Gerry, it was Derry. But for his mother’s people, the McLaughlins, that was deepest Donegal. A wee homestead called Shandrum – a two-bedroomed, whitewashed cottage with a series of sheds, a…

As Valentine’s Day approaches, some of us will wonder what to buy our beloved. And some of the less romantic among us won’t – complaining that it’s just another Hallmark Card celebration… Gerry was very much in the nostalgia camp. Every year he went out to buy twelve red roses. Very romantic! And being a…

According to The Dictionary of Irish Biography introduction: The Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) is a project of the Royal Irish Academy. It tells the island’s life story through the biographies, at home and overseas, of prominent men and women born in Ireland, north and south, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland.…

On 24th September 2019, long time friend and former colleague of Dad’s Robin Elliott organised a special charity evening at the Grand Opera House ‘Remembering Gerry Anderson‘. Robin put together a brilliant array of Ireland’s top entertainers that included Brian Kennedy, The Adventures, The Miami Showband, Bronagh Gallagher, Rose-Marie, Malachi Cush, Mirenda Rosenberg, Jim Brown,…

There is no doubt that Gerry was a people person. And there’s nothing he liked more than people watching. Not in a judgy or nosey way. He loved to study and observe people as they went about their daily lives. I am not sure when it started. But I think that studying social anthropology at…

Mark Patterson from BBC Radio Foyle has been looking back on legendary bands from Derry recently. Today it was my turn to join Colum Arbuckle and Jim Whiteside to reminisce about Toejam. Although Colum and Jim were doing most of the story telling considering I was still in a nappy when Toejam hit the scene!…