In case you thought that the whole renovation project had hit the buffers, I present you with the work of art that is a curtain pole attached to a wall:
Once you’ve finished gazing in wonder at that, you’ll doubtless be asking yourself how it was secured, taking into account preservation of the vapour barrier, dry lining, DIY ineptitude, etc.
The answer is that it was a total pain in the arse, using those Gripit things that some child designed and got promoted following an appearance on Dragons’ Den. The tone of my previous sentence might offer some clue as to how much I’d recommend them.
As I’m writing this now in the future (23rd October 2019), I note that there’s been a story this week about how the company behind the evil hybrid of Rawlplug and Kinder Egg toy is teetering on the brink of insolvency.
The case for the karma police rests.
Apparently there should be a photo involving the curtains themselves. I think they detract from the craftsmanship of the curtain pole hanging, but for completeness:
To provide some context for those numbers, the bacteriological counts aren’t what anyone would hope for, but if they were taken from the sea at a beach, it’d still qualify for a blue flag. Which probably says more about the wisdom of not drinking seawater than it does the healthiness of our well.
Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, we weren’t able to spend the weekend of the Doolin Folk Festival in the trailer tent. This meant that we missed out on being cold, wet and uncomfortable during the night, but we were very brave about it all.
Instead, we stayed in a guesthouse a few kilometres away:
It was handy enough, especially as we’d booked it very last-minute.
We got to Doolin on Friday evening and hit the ground running by going to see Noel Hill, the concertina player.
Noel Hill at Doolin
He was pretty entertaining, especially when he got out his secret weapon: a really small concertina.
“But what would a tiny concertina look like?”
I’m glad you asked:
Tiny concertina
Clannad played later on. Hard to top the micro instrument mastery, but they somehow managed it.
A gentle start with Julian Barnes (author of loads of books I really like) and Paul Muldoon (Pulitzer Prize-winner for poetry) chatting about life in a very unstructured fashion.
An excellent continuation of the day’s talks with Ed Vulliamy (journalist/writer/singer) and Fiachna Ó Braonáin (Hothouse Flowers / radio presenter) discussing Ed’s book “When Words Fail” as part of the overall topic “Musicians are the heralds of the future”. Not sure if I’d read the book, but I’d gladly go and see him talk and perform any time. Picture below is a grainy effort of a shot during their cover of Mr. Tamborine Man. The audience got behind it well.
A hard act to follow, for sure.
However, the last talk we went to on that Sunday blew the rest away… Tim Smit (do-er of stuff) was an inspiration. He talked about how he came to set up the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Helligan, which you’d expect, but also how he went from having a very successful music career to walking away and doing something different.
11-12 noon: Dalrymple’s India. An hour of William Dalrymple presenting some highlights of the last five years of his work on the book “The Anarchy: The Fall of the Mughal Empire and the Rise of the East India Company”. He had some fascinating stories and related them to the current death throes of the British empire and the prevalence of global corporations that appear beyond the law (Facebook vs. East India Company, etc.)
12.30-1.30pm: Up Against The Wall: real-life Narcos, Trump’s wall, etc.
L-R: Carl Bernstein, Misha Glenny, Ed Vulliamy
Out of the dimly-lit hotel, and back to the sunny fields of the main festival area.
View of Borris house
2-3pm: Return to Libya. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar and the Irish Times’ Paris Correspondent Lara Marlowe talking about the truth behind the disappearance of Matar’s father. Without wishing to appear callous, it didn’t hold my interest well… not due to the subject, but I just didn’t find the interviewing style engaging.
3.30-4.30pm: On a bit of a downer from the last talk, I went to a performance of four 15-minute slots by different people:
Anne Enright talking about something I’ve long since forgotten.
Martha West, who gave an excellent performance of some of her poems about growing up – a real highlight.
Lucy Siegle talking about fast fashion.
Finally, a dessert course of William Dalrymple talking about the Coptic influence on the Celtic church.
To be honest, I wish I’d had a liquid lunch as it might have taken the edge off the afternoon nicely. As it was, I decided to call it a day on the talks after that.
Straight off the Dublin ferry at 5am, we made our way through the quiet streets towards Boris. We weren’t allowed to show up until early afternoon, but thankfully friends in Kildare were awake enough that we could visit them along the way. I was towing the Cabanon trailer tent, which added to the fun and games.
When we finally pitched up in Borris, the hard standing was basically a car park with some fine gravel on it. The neighbours were very friendly, especially one we spent a good deal of time with. She even made us tea in the mornings, and we shared our banana bread. The camping facilities were woeful, unfortunately. For a festival that’s not really aimed at the same demographic as Electric Picnic or Glastonbury, they really should have provided enough portaloos and ensured that they were hygenic throughout – at one point they’d run out of running water.
The shower was a converted horse box, which obviously struck someone as quirky and fun at the time, but was heavily over-subscribed. The only thing in its favour was that I met some interesting people while queuing for it in the mornings.
There were a number of speakers on at any given time slot, so choosing was quite difficult with some of them. Thankfully the same speakers gave different talks throughout the weekend, so if there was one particular person you wanted to see, it would probably be possible if you weren’t so worried about their topic.
The Friday programme was quite speaker-packed, despite the shorter time available.
4-5pm: The West Cork Podcast crew discussed their true crime reporting of the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder case. It would probably have helped to have been following their series, but I’d read about the case before at least. If I’m honest, I found it a bit ghoulish, but what could you expect?
Garden marquee for West Cork Podcast discussion
5.15 – 6.15pm: Crimes against humanity? Philippe Sands discussing the road from Nuremburg to now with the great Fintan O’Toole.
6.30 – 7.30pm: Water off a duck’s back? Carl Bernstein, Martin Amis and Ed Vulliamy discussing the difficulty of reporting on scandals nowadays when investigative journalists are branded ‘enemies of the people’.
L-R: Martin Amis, Ed Vulliamy, Carl Bernstein
7.30 – 8.30pm: The Misinformation Age: Simon Schama, Misha Glenny and Fintan O’Toole talking about the survival of democracy in a world run by algorithms.
We set off from Harrogate at 4pm, heading for Liverpool and the overnight ferry to Dublin. I’d spent a fair few hours re-working our trailer tent to make it more suitable for carrying cargo (and easier to pitch), so was a bit anxious to see how that held up to the journey. I’m not known (in a positive sense) for my woodworking skills, but amazingly things held together ok.
Here’s a shot of the outcome of my da Vinci-level design skills:
The journey was mostly fine apart from when Google Maps decided that the optimal route to the docks was via a housing estate with a possibly unrivalled collection of speed bumps. The trailer remained attached throughout.
Another time lapse vid – this time a view onto the front of the house. This camera is mounted on a pole and gets a bit more battered by the elements (hence the rain drop ‘filters’ on some days).
Last year I setup a python script to run every day at 2pm to grab a still frame from some of my security cameras around the outside of the house. Today I mashed them together to see how it’d look as a time lapse video, where 1 second = 1 day (apart from days missed due to technical issues, etc.) You’ll note that almost nothing happens there 🙂
Spoiler alert: at the two minute mark, snow appears.
Had to do it, sorry. Vienna is full of Egon Schiele‘s paintings. We saw a lot of them on our first day in the city at the Leopold Museum, and then in pretty much every other gallery too. The last museum we went to (the Belvedere) even had a big exhibition (now finished) about how they came to acquire his paintings, and the use of various technologies to reveal construction and earlier versions of paintings beneath the ones we can see now.
I think it’s fair to say that Schiele was pretty rock ‘n’ roll for his day (unfortunately including allegations of inappropriate behaviour with children), and was very prolific in his output (> 3000 paintings up until his death aged 28 in 1918). We saw a lot of his most famous work, and it’s brilliant and totally original in its style.
