95 Picadilly

By Shane Gilreath In life you have the first string and the second string, just like in sports. Over the weekend, I was reminded perpetually that I am second string in my own family. When you’re second string, you don’t necessarily get a say in what happens, but you’re expected to survive it, deal with…

By Shane Gilreath When I woke up Sunday morning, for half a second, I thought about rolling over and going back to sleep. Like many people, I’m not naturally a morning person, and the 8:30AM Holy Mass at my parish can feel exceptionally early on a lazy weekend morning. There’s a certain sense of obligation…

I try to keep this column pretty apolitical, but something happened last week in my home state of Kentucky that should open a lot of eyes. In fact, it should terrify Americans. There seem to be far more minions than independent thinkers these days – in both parties. For years, I poured my heart and…

There’s an old saying that life can turn on a dime, and over the last year, I’ve learned just how true that can be. Since losing my sister in April 2025, it has felt as though my life has been caught in a constant spiral. As many will know, grief has a way of moving…

“To be a Southerner was a matter of life-and-death importance during my formative years,” wrote the American-born Duchess of Windsor in her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons. In her sentiment, she was not alone. As a child, the same attitude lived, devoutly and freely, in our home. I heard its stories and walked in…

I’ve told this story before, but a decade or so ago, Rendy – a dear, lifelong friend of mine – called to say I was on television. That wouldn’t have been anything unusual in a former chapter of my life, but what she meant was the cast of Southern Charm. “Your kind of people,” she…

I’ve called myself a jack of all trades and master of none, and there’s some truth in that. I tend to be arrogant enough to believe I can learn most things with enough time and effort. Writing, though, doesn’t quite follow those rules. It isn’t something you conquer so much as something you travel with.…

Life can be a grand enigma, full of shifting terrain and unexpected turns. It has a plethora of changes and vicissitudes that send us in all directions at once, often before we’ve had time to understand where we are headed. Last week, for many of us – amid the usual noise of life – tax…

Sibling rivalry, at its best, is a kind of private story, isn’t it? Made up of half competition, half companionship, and the merging of those two worlds is wholly impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. Growing up, we kept score on everything. Not just the obvious things – sets on the tennis…

When news of the Roberta II landfill first broke last May, I admit my first reaction wasn’t outrage like so many. It was something closer to a shrug. After all, I grew up around it. In conversation, if not in practice. I had an uncle who owned a waste management company. Garbage wasn’t some distant…