Journal tags: rel

I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up.

Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythical time of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, Brigid is set in the relatively recent past of early Christian Ireland.

I was curious to see which Brigid this book would be about: the pagan goddess or the Christian saint?

Both, it turns out. The protagonist is the saint, but the narrator is the goddess. And they interact. It’s a clever framing device and for the most part, it works.

There are cameos a-plenty from the Christian pantheon like Patrick and Brendan the navigator but this is not the hagiography we learned in school. All the usual miracles are present and accounted for, but any supernatural powers aren’t ascribed to a Christian deity.

The world of Brigid isn’t so far removed from the world of The Morrigan after all.

Brigid isn’t a ground-breaking book, and it didn’t grab me as much as The Morrigan but it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird.

Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing.

It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the speed of light—or get close to something very massive—then the large-scale relativistic effects kick in.

If you travel close to the speed of light for a short time, it will seem like a much longer time to everyone you left behind. This is the twin paradox, which isn’t really a parodox at all, just time dilation in action.

There are some coincidental parallels to this kind of time dilation in old folk tales.

The Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō tells of a fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded with a relaxing few days in an underwater kingdom, only to find that when he returns home to his village, 300 years have passed.

The Irish tale of Oisín describes the warrior’s journey to Tir na nÓg, the land of youth. He spends three years there but when he returns to Éire to see his old fighting comrades from the Fianna, 300 years have passed.

This story gives us a wonderfully poetic turn of phrase that’s still used today. The closest English equivalent is “Billy no mates”, a rather cruel term to describe someone with no friends. In Irish, we say:

Mar Oisín i ndiadh na Fianna

Like Oisín after the Fianna.

For the past few years, I’ve been taking a trip to Spain at the end of September for the Cáceres Irish Fleadh. Last year I convinced my friends Liam and Monica to come along and they had a great time.

Like me, Liam just loves playing in sessions. Also like me, Liam likes to spend the gloomy short days of January thinking about travelling somewhere …and then playing in sessions there.

I told him I’d put together a list of potential trips for the discerning session hound. I figured I might as well share it here too…

First of all, there are Irish music festivals. Alas, most festivals don’t happen in the sunny climes of Spain. As you’d expect, most of them are in Ireland.

I’m heading to Carlingford at the end of this month for a weekend of Féile na Tána. I haven’t been before but it looks good. There’ll be the usual amalgam of workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Myself and Jessica will fly in to Belfast, then take the train down to Newry and get to Carlingford from there. You could fly into Dublin and get the train up to Dundalk, but the only Gatwick flights to Dublin are Ryan Air, and I’d rather entrust my instrument to EasyJet.

At the end of March we’re heading to Tullamore Trad Fest. That’s another one we haven’t been to before. Again, there’ll be workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Tullamore is just an hour away from Dublin by train and has plenty of accommodation options. We’ve booked into a nice-looking B&B.

There’s no avoiding Ryan Air for this trip and I want to take my good mandolin, so I’ve gone ahead and booked a separate seat for it. I don’t want to take any chances with an airline that actively seeks to elevate misery.

The festival I heartily recommend is Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July. It’s super convenient to get to with EasyJet flights from Gatwick—go to Belfast city airport, which is right downtown.

The festival offers a really good accommodation deal in modern student flats. The workshops are top-notch, and best of all, it has a really well-organised session trail. You can easily play in sessions all afternoon and evening.

This year, for the first time ever, Belfast trad fest is immediately followed by the all-Ireland fleadh, which promises to be pandemonium. I’ve never been to the fleadh before but I’m going to stick around Belfast for it.

You could head to the Willie Clancy Festival in Miltown Malbay at the start of July (the website seems to be having some issues right now). But good luck finding accommodation. The event is so big now that unless you’re camping, there’s not much chance of finding a place to stay. If you make it there though, non-stop sessions await. Non-stop chaos awaits too. That’s part of the deal. Great workshops though!

There are other festivals I haven’t been to but I’ve heard great things about. The Pádraig O’Keeffe Festival in Kerry in October sounds fantastic, especially if you like your polkas and slides. But it’s in Castleisland, which doesn’t have much in the way of accommodation. So unless you’ve got transport, it’s going to be tricky.

There’s a trad fest in Kilkenny in March. I’ve never been but they’ve got a session trail. You’d need to fly into either Dublin or Cork and then get on a bus. Either way, it’s Ryan Air from Gatwick.

I’ve also never been to the Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November but I’ve heard good things. Accommodation for the 2026 event is already in short supply though.

But you don’t need a festival to play in sessions. In fact, the kind of sessions you end up in at festivals have a different vibe to the usual sessions, simply because they’re formed of a hodge-podge of visiting players.

There a few spots in Ireland where you’re guaranteed a session pretty much any night of the week.

I love Galway. There are afternoon sessions in Taafe’s and Tigh Cóilí as well as evening sessions in the Crane and other places. You’d need to fly into Dublin and get the train from there. It takes about two hours.

Galway is busy in the summer time and accommodation can be pricy, but if you go off-season you can find some cheaper options.

Ennis has music most nights. There’s a regular bus service between Ennis and Shannon airport that’s nice and quick. You’d need to fly Ryan Air from Gatwick though.

And then there’s Belfast again. Even when the trad fest isn’t happening, Belfast has sessions seven nights a week. Check out the Belfast session guide Instagram account for up-to-date details.

I recommend staying in The Flint, but make sure you ask for a room on the top floor far away from the nightclub if you’re there on a weekend.

So, to recap, here are some festivals to check out:

• Féile na Tána in Carlingford, county Louth in January (I’m going),
• Tullamore Trad Fest in county Offaly in March (I’m going),
• Kilkenny Trad Fest also in March,
• Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay, county Clare in July,
• Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July (I’m going),
• Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann also in Belfast at the start of August (I’m going),
• Cáceres Irish Fleadh in Spain in September (I’m going),
• The Pádraig O’Keeffe festival in Castleisland, county Kerry in October, and
• Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November.

And then for year-round session action, you can visit:

• Galway,
• Ennis, and
• Belfast

As part of their on-stage banter, The Dubliners used to quip that “All the books that are banned in Ireland should be published in Irish, to encourage more people to learn their native tongue.”

There was no shortage of banned books back in the day. I’m reading one of them now. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

About halfway through the book, I read this passage:

The parcels for the Halloween party were coming every day. I couldn’t ask my father for one because a man is not able to do these things, so I wrote to him for money instead and a day girl brought me a barmbrack, apples, and monkey-nuts.

Emphasis mine, because that little list sounded so familiar to me.

Back in 2011, I wrote a candygram for Jason. It was called Monkey nuts, barmbrack and apples.

It’s not exactly Edna O’Brien, but looking back at it fifteen years on, I think it turned out okay.

I was supposed to be in Cork over the weekend.

Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar.

We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed.

See, Storm Amy was moving in. We were hoping to get into Cork before the storm hit, but now with the flight delayed, that wasn’t likely. In fact, it was more likely that the flight would just get more and more delayed and possibly even get diverted.

To start with, we settled in at the airport, prepared to spend an hour or two more than we had planned. But, sure enough, the delays kept piling up. It was time to make decision; wait it out in the hopes that we’d eventually make a very bumpy landing in Cork, or cut our losses and run.

I quickly looked up flights for the next couple of weekends and spotted some cheap ones a fortnight away. I booked them and then called my mother to tell her we wouldn’t be showing up that night, but we’d see her in a couple of weeks.

Alright then, time to go home.

Wait a minute …how exactly are we supposed to leave the airport other than on an airplane?

It turns out there’s a process called “decontrolling”. You need to find someone from the airline (or in our case, a third-party contractor operating on the airline’s behalf) who has the security privileges to walk you back out. But you still need to go through passport control …even though you never left the building.

Luckily we didn’t have any checked luggage or it would’ve gotten complicated. As it was, it was just weird. It was all very City And The City.

That flight we abandoned did finally take off …six hours late. By that time we were back home on the sofa eating pizza and listening to the wind gusting outside. I think we made the right choice.

After spending a week immersed in the language and the landscape of Glencolmcille, Jessica and I were headed to Miltown Malbay for the annual Willie Clancy music week.

I could only get us accommodation from the Monday onwards so we had a weekend in between Donegal and Clare. We decided to spend it in Galway.

We hadn’t booked any travel from Glencolmcille to Galway and that worked out fine. We ended up getting a lift from a fellow student (and fellow blogger) heading home to Limerick.

Showing up in Galway on a busy Saturday afternoon was quite the change after the peace and quiet of Glencolmcille. But we dove right in and enjoyed a weekend of good food and music.