Dede Sophie

With more than 10pc of Audis sold in Ireland last year being electric, it’s clear that Volkswagen’s premium brand is playing its part in the push by the group towards an all-electric future, writes Brian Byrne. Nearly half of those sales were of the Q4 e-tron, the newest and smaller of the three Audi EVs available. My review car is newer still, as the Sportback version of the Q4 e-tron, and I was quite taken with the softer rear roofline compared to the full SUV version’s. It has the style of a coupe liftback, but without sacrificing any of the passenger space, and only mildly diminishing boot capacity. In size it not surprisingly is close to the VW ID.5 equivalent and a bit more compact than key competitor Hyundai’s Ioniq 5. I thought the car’s shape was very well displayed in the non-metallic grey — they call it Pebblestone — of the review car.  The Q4 e-tron stylists held on to the sense of a grille front end, which I still think gives an EV more presenc...

CONGRATS TO LUCKY WINNER – EMILY! “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her — her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy. I was in a hurry when I opened this audiobook and didn’t realize at first it was the author herself reading it out loud! It certainly made for a unique reading experience, and that made it all the more fulfilling somehow. I hadn’t read the paper version of the novel and was unprepared for the gamut of emotions the story takes a listener thro...

This short film is part of our lost video collection from when we first visited Morocco in 2010. It was a little wild in Morocco at that time and being tall Europeans we stood out like a sore thumb making us an absolute target for the locals. The whole time we were then we were being approached by unwanted salesmen, scammed several times until we realised what was going on, and generally ignored in the cafes and restaurants presumably because of either local religious reasons or because I was with my wife. That being said we visited a few years later after the King of Morocco wanted to create an environment that would attract more foreign visitors and we found it felt a lot safer with much less unsolicited encounters. If you would like to see more videos like this then check out our YouTube channel – ‘Walking Talking Gardeners’. It is absolutely free to subscribe and you can unsubscribe immediately at any time.