Welcome back for Otwo Issue 6!
Howdy,
Welcome back for Issue 6 of the OTwo Magazine! To tell you the truth, it doesn’t feel long at all since we last wrote up one of these letters. The weeks are going by as quick as anything these days. It feels like we could blink twice and end up right back in exam season before another year comes and goes. But to put a nice spin on it, the quicker the time passes, the sooner we’re all back out in the beer gardens with your friends! So c’mon we get stuck into this trimester for the time that’s in it and go ungodly off the rails when it's all said and done. Deal, yeah?
We can’t answer for yourselves, but we were kind of expecting a quiet-ish start to the year after the mania of 2020. Now, in hindsight, it was never going to be quiet, but a group of randoms on Reddit pretty much breaking Wall Street less than a month into the new year? Jaysus lads calm down, it’s only just February. Like I’m sure it won’t be the last insane thing to happen before the year’s out, but talk about setting the standard! Fair play to them.
Although this Season may have felt like the longest on record, we have been gifted with the unique opportunity to boast about having survived our first winter in isolation. Pat on the back, please people.
As we self-celebrate another dismal threshold, let’s allow our imaginations to go wild for a moment; perhaps you bulk ordered this issue of OTwo to your temporary palatial resort location in Bali, reading it by your plunge pool and using the remaining copies as towels, folded delicately on a rack that sits beside your handcrafted, marble 18th-century deep-well sink?
Maybe, as you scan through our “Oscar predictions'', you are laughing at the beauty of your cat-like financial reflexes in the Game Stop stock market that brought you this good fortune? Whilst the rest of us kick ourselves for forgetting our Revolut passcode. You would think such a stock explosion at this time of the year would cause for a definite spike in Valentine’s Day expenditure- but, alas, I think we can all agree that the cast of ‘the big short’ did not have one girlfriend to share between them.
On the topic of Valentine’s Day, four of our most Romantic staff members contribute their memories of their most poignant dates in our ‘Fatal Fourway’! And dealing with topics of romanticism, Doireann asks ‘How does visual Art evoke such emotion?’ a beautiful piece in this issue, and also a question I ask myself when I am confronted every year with a Valentine’s day card from my Mother designed by MOONPIG.
Not to mention, Anna Blackburn, our resident Literature & Drama go-to, has a fantastic and insightful interview with Roddy Doyle on the front cover!.
Stay safe, stay romantic and stay reading!
Ellen & Andy.