Journal Entries
If Wishes...
Posted Oct 20, 2015
I wish all my friends were here, all at once. I miss some of them badly. 
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Latest reply: Oct 20, 2015
Sunday
Posted Oct 11, 2015
That was the first time in quite a few years I've seen the inside of a church on a Sunday. 
And I actually quite enjoyed it, believe it or not!
It did have a surreal kind of feeling once or twice - like "am I really here?" 
And I spared the people around me by not singing along. (They all had voices *much* higher than mine - and I'm no bass! - but I would have sounded like a fog horn). And I kept a respectful silence while they said a prayer for the queen, but I still really enjoyed it.
A thought crossed my mind: a lot of religious rules and traditions had practical reasons when they started out - dietary rules and so forth - and I just wondered if all the standing up, and sitting down, actually started as a means to stop people from falling asleep.
Then, after that, we went to the pub to watch Ireland beat France. Lovely atmosphere! You could hear a pin drop when Ireland were taking a kick on goal. Even the baby stopped crying, which was a bit eerie!
(There's a rumour that Irish people have long memories. Not true. The guy who said "Take that, France! That's for not landing your troops in to help us in 1796!" is not representative of all of us. Probably. 
)
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Latest reply: Oct 11, 2015
The blackbird
Posted Oct 3, 2015
It's actually quite difficult to write an entry about the passing of Brian Friel.
I don't know what way to put it into words.
One of the oldest written poems we have in Ireland is about a blackbird. It has been published in lots of books, and I think there have been numerous translations. Carson did one, and I think Heaney did one, but when I think of the blackbird, I imagine it saying:
"Hey man, I'm just being a blackbird. I'm not doing anything special. I'm just doing blackbird-y things."
And I imagine Brian Friel saying: "Exactly. That's why we're all writing about you."
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Latest reply: Oct 3, 2015
Love old things like this.
Posted Sep 29, 2015
It's probably no secret to any of you lot that I've got a bit of a book-buying...well, "habit" is probably the word. In the Lou Reed sense.
But if anything, my newspaper/magazine/periodical habit is even more severe, particularly if it's something uncommon - from another time or place, for example. So I was delighted to end up with a few issues of "Sputnik" today.
Sputnik is a true Cold War product. It's essentially USSR propaganda for the outside world. It's largely about Russian history and culture. Very little of it is about the USSR or the October Revolution, Lenin, etc, but it's about winning friendship abroad.
In Ireland at the time, we fell within the American sphere of influence rather than the Russian, and a lot of what was really Cold War propaganda was part of the mainstream discourse and seemed like obvious common sense. So it's interesting to see the Russian mirror image of the Reader's Digest.
Apart from the end of the Cold War, there's another way this periodical shows its age: the letters pages. It's all "Dear Sir, I would like a pen-pal in Leningrad." No Facebook back then...
I wonder how many of the letters were really "Dear sir, I would like a pen-pal, to tell him about what's going on at the RAF base..."
(I did also notice that the letter writer from, er, the city on the River Foyle gave his address as Londonderry. I would have thought the pro-Moscow camp in that city in 1970 would have been in the 'Derry' camp! )
I love old periodicals. 
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Latest reply: Sep 29, 2015
He put *what* in a dead pig's mouth?
Posted Sep 20, 2015
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. 
And I thought *2legs* loved bacon.
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Latest reply: Sep 20, 2015
KB
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