The 12 Apostles
On the seventh of September 2026 I sat down and asked for guidance, and twelve things came. I did not choose them and I did not put them in order. They arrived, and when I looked at the list I recognised every single one.
They are my twelve guides — my twelve apostles — and they are the shape of everything I am going to write here. Some are books I want to write. Some are wounds I have spent a lifetime walking around rather than through. One is my work. One is the woman I love, and one is the woman I want to live as. It’s hard to even write that not to mind say it out loud but it is true, whether I cherish it or nay. I intend to turn and face each of them in turn and ask what it has to say to me, instead of running, which is what I have mostly done until now. Observe my signature and see I start slowly but quickly rush to the end, moving fast lest it should hurt – story of my life!
My brother Dessy played the piano in Cork for eleven days to nobody at all, and then they came, in their hundreds. His advice was to start now, and to wait if I have to. So here it is: the list of 12 apostles and here it starts.
1. Ode to Coumeenole
Ode to Coumeenole is the book of poetry that came through me between the death of my mother in 2006 and the death of my brother Paddy in 2010. I say came through me rather than written by me, because I had never written poetry before and I have written very little any since — a verse arrived for each of my brothers and sisters, for my mother, my father, my two children, their mother and for my sister Pauline, long since passed. When I read it back now it speaks to me from somewhere wiser than my ordinary everyday life. That’s why it’s the first of the twelve. I want to weave in and out of it as I write, and listen to what it still has to say.
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2. Seven Spiritual Laws
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success is a book by Deepak Chopra that Antoinette, my wife at the time and mother of my children, gifted to me as we arrived down to live in Kerry, having moved from Dublin. She knew I was searching for something. She bought it for me most lovingly. I couldn’t put it down. There’s a law for each day of the week which I read over and over until I very nearly knew them all by heart. After two years of telling everybody else they ought to follow the laws, a good friend suggested I might follow them myself — and I did! Following my passion led my life into chaos. I am circling the same ground again now, but from a place of steadiness rather than flight, and that is the difference; a very real difference.
Everything filed under Seven Spiritual Laws →
3. Balancing Chakras
I came across Caroline Myss twenty-odd years ago, around the time I began doing Reiki healing. Reiki is in large, part the work of balancing the seven major chakras along the length of the spine. Each one carries a different energy through the spiritual, emotional and physical body. They line up neatly with the seven sacraments, the seven phases of a life, the seven colours and, if you kept going, most of the sevens in the universe. My heart, the centre Chakra, I believe is balanced but the rest of them are all a little out of kilter (me thinks!). This is the apostle that keeps me returning to the quiet, unglamorous work of getting steady. A long yet rewarding journey
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4. The Boys in This House
The Boys in This House is the book I want to write about growing up in a large family in Ireland in the fifties and the sixties — thirteen of us, though one died at just six weeks before I was born. My mother used to throw her hands up and cry “The boys in this house”, as though we were a particular species of trouble. It affected me deeply. I grew up with the notion that being a boy was not a thing you would choose had you the choice. I’ve argued with myself endlessly about whether that is the reason I would prefer to live as a woman. I’ve argued the other side just as hard, and in truth, I no longer know. What I do know is that the story holds all the joy, pain and the sheer fabulousness of being alive inside an Irish family. I want to tell it. I want to get past my blocks, once and for all, and get writing.
Everything filed under The Boys in This House →
5. Tuskar Rock
Tuskar Rock is where my father’s plane came down in March 1968, killing all sixty-one people aboard. It was an Aer Lingus flight from Cork to London, and most people today don’t even know that Aer Lingus ever crashed. I was thirteen. For thirty years I assumed it hadn’t affected me. Then I understood that it had, in some small way – “sure it must have” I argued at first and then that it had affected me not just ‘a small bit’ but a great deal. Then later I realised it had not only affected me, it had defined me right down to my core, my deepest sense of who I am and how I live my life, my every breath, my very own shape. I’ve lived my life in a hurry in case I’d have felt the hurt again. No wonder my signature gallops to an end! I’m facing into it now though and that ‘facing’, although healing and soothing, is causing a lot of disruption. I would far rather turn and ask this apostle what it has to say than keep running from it. Let’s hope I’ve learned how.
Everything filed under Tuskar Rock →
6. Song, Dance and Music
Song, Dance and Music is the creative, singing side of me, and I am putting it here because I keep not doing it. What I would love is a show with no backing tracks at all, no overly structured support and yet disciplined in it’s passion – whatever that might be; a place where I let go entirely and let the voice I was given be a pleasure to somebody else – follow my passion in service. There is no ego in true service — when you’re truly in service you do not know you’re there, you simply follow what you love and the service comes through you. Whether I ever learn to dance is another matter but who knows, I might yet write a song. Imagine that.
Everything filed under Song, Dance and Music →
7. Famous Seamus
Famous Seamus (or Fame us, Shame Us) is the storyteller within. I tell stories and jokes, and when I let go of myself I get right inside them — as I did the other night at the table, with Ronan, Davy, Clare, Andrew, Dessy, Kevin and of course my beautiful Amanda. On a night like that I’m not Petra. I’m not Peter. I’m just myself, which may be the whole point. Amanda urges me on. I want to listen to her, so this is where I stop running from the gift and let it take its own shape through me.
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8. CICCO-ARRT
CICCO-ARRT is the accounting side of my life. I’m not shy about it. I’m an FCMA, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and proud of it. What I love is the engineering of it — the systems underneath the numbers. CICCO-ARRT, my life’s work is a genuinely simple way of using emerging technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, to make bookkeeping, admin and financial management easy for small business owners. I love it. It can be dry and it can be slow but I stay with it. I would like to leave something behind me in the accounting world, something I can be proud of.
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9. Lady Petra
Lady Petra is the plainest thing I have to say and the hardest thing to do: I want to live my life as a woman. Given the choice today I would far rather live as a woman than as a man, and I have wanted that for as long as I can remember, through a thousand arguments with myself about why. I’m finished analysing it. I’m paralysed in circular discussion. I know what I want and would prefer but know not how — how to begin, and how to do it without turning over every good thing I have. When I first wrote this down it said only “live as Petra”, and then I added “with style and panache”, because in the past I dressed as a woman with no style at all, and not long ago I threw the whole lot out for exactly that reason. My friend Vicki transitioned twenty years ago, having known all her life that she was female. She says nothing changed about who she is — only the way she expresses herself. I hold on to that.
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10. Petrafied Proper Fool
Petrafied Proper Fool is the telling itself — the blog, the vlog, the daily recording, the whole business of saying it out loud. My brother Dessy played the piano in Cork for eleven days to nobody at all, and then they came in their hundreds, and his advice to me was to start now and wait if I have to. So I’m starting. What I would love is to come online in the morning without preparing a word and to simply say hello, this is how I feel today — on video, on audio, in writing, whatever suits the day. An Irishman born in the fifties, in his seventies now, believing in life and love and finding both confusing, and saying so without dressing it up.
Everything filed under Petrafied Proper Fool →
11. Family Generations
Family Generations is the hardest of the twelve to keep looking at. I lost my father in 1968 and I lost my own two children in 2002 — not through their death but through mine, the emotional kind, when I left their mother and hoped to stay close to them but did not, could not. Twenty years have gone by. What I want is to find them and tell them that I love them, I am their father and I never meant to hurt them. I want to tell them why I had to leave. I want that far more for their sake than for mine. Beyond that, though, this is about generational pain and generational healing, and about what travels down a line if nobody turns and faces it. If one generation doesn’t dry the next one will, they say. It leaves me vulnerable. I’m afraid of doing further damage. Let me have the courage to have no courage at all, and stay facing it. Let me let go! Let me live in love, not in fear.
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12. A Love Story
A Love Story, my love story, is Amanda. She’s brought me a steadiness I’ve never had since I was a child — I’ve lived in this house, in Derry, longer than anywhere since the ten years in Kilahora, Cork. Every other address was months or a few short years. People ask whether I like living in Derry, I always say I like living with Amanda, and I do. We’ve had our rows; we both carry issues up one arm and down the other, as most people do, but that’s what makes you unique and beautiful in your imperfections. And here is the bald truth of it, I want to live as a woman, but I’m afraid of what that would do to us. That fear stops me in my tracks. It’s held me in bondage longer than anything else has. The irony I keep turning over is that it’s the steadiness of her love that gives me the ground to face the unsteadiness of it all.
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Recorded and written on 7 September 2026. This list is the foundation. Everything else on this site hangs off it.