Scavenger Photo Hunt August 2017

Dear All

I've been kind of caught up with stuff this past couple of months so I thought I'd catch up through this month's Scavenger Hunt organised by Hawthorn at I Live, I Love, I Craft.  Thank you Hawthorn for hosting this each month - it really gets the grey cells working and at the moment they need all the help they can get :) 

1. Relaxed 

Meet our new-to-us caravan and we're away for a much needed week of relaxation.  This was not an easy acquisition for me.  The gypsies live in caravans - and for much of my life I've felt like a gypsy being on the road so much.  lol
Anyway I'm over it now and cannot wait to hit the road again - it's really only about the size of a tent on wheels, but I love it.

2. It begins with an M...

At the end of last month my Mum turned 90.  We had a family gathering for her and she was so pleased to see cousins from America and England as well as from all over Ireland.  My mum, Marguerite, is a great crafter - she's just finishing another crocheted blanket at the minute, so a friend of mine made this beautiful cake with wool and crochet flowers on it.  

3. Time for...

A new CD!!  

Yay .... We got it finished in time for the festival at the end of July and had a very successful launch concert.  The final run of CDs won't be here for another couple of weeks (we got a short run done for the launch), so we'll be starting to promote after our holiday.   That's always fun once you get over the initial panic of letting people hear what you've been doing and keep your fingers crossed that they like it.
This is a collection of mostly our own songs, with Tom singing 4 of his own songs on the album and yours truly doing the rest.  With the exception of one traditional song "Peace in Erin" written in the early 1800s, and one from a wonderful American singer songwriter, the rest of the offerings are ours - songs about immigration, politics, peace and our travels.

4. Tangerine 

Sitting in the hairdresser's last week I was rummaging through the list of prompts and trying to get ideas of what I could photograph for each of them - but Tangerine left me stumped.  So as a last measure I headed off to Google to see what would come up under the word ... And lo and behold there's a new literary magazine published here in Northern Ireland that I had never heard of.   So thank  you Hawthorn for this prompt.   My first two copies have just arrived - in time for leisurely reading time  - looking forward to diving in.    Introducing The Tangerine Magazine

5. It begins with an O... 

I missed last month's Scavenger hunt, but while I was searching for an image to fit the word Ring I took this pic of a stone landing in the water.   Isn't it a perfect O? ;)

6. Whiskery

Our last cat died nearly three years ago and I miss her greatly.  But a special bonus has been the rise in bird numbers in the garden.  We were both gettng to a place of thinking that we'll maybe not have a cat again and enjoy feeding and watching the birds coming and going instead - after all, they don't need minding when we're away on a tour.
But then, we started getting a regular visitor - this three coloured very talkative female who decided that she owned our house and garden.   Tom came in from the garage one day to find her in the kitchen sitting looking at him as if to say "where have you been?"  At our pre festival party she wandered in again and sat in the middle of everyone as happy as Larry.   So a few weeks back I posted this photo on Facebook and asked if anyone knew her and my friend, another musician, who lives about 1/4 mile away came back - "omg, that's our cat!"
Her name's Peaches and she's still visiting - occasionally bringing her two friends with her.   We thought this was really funny - musician to musician - good taste, this cat has!
However!!  Now she's attacking my birds and we are not amused - two beautiful nesting wood pigeons who cooed us awake each morning have both been killed ... some action is going to have to be taken.  

7. Lace -

It's been a constant job this year, removing spiders, from both inside and outside the house - endless.   But you have to forgive the wee blighters when they weave such beautiful webs.  This one appeared the other morning on the fuchsia bush outside the window.  Thankfully you can't see the dirt of my windows in this photo!!

8. Bridge 

Well a sort of bridge ....

After years of negotiating and arguing and political posturing, a ferry has been opened to cross Carlingford Lough between Greenore in the South and Greencastle in the North.  We decided to come back that way from Dublin a few weeks back ... The top view is looking north to the Mournes and the bottom one, looking back to the Cooley's.  It's a lovely crossing, ideal if you're doing a tourist trip between Dublin and Belfast and wanting to take the coast road the whole way ... but it was absolutely freezing that day.  

9. Letters

Last year I wrote here about Poetic Action Rostrevor (PAR), a lovely initiative started by my friend Catherine which she brought back here after visiting a small Spanish village where someone in turn had picked it up from somewhere in South America.  

Last year the organisers put up 20 boards around the village and this year added 7 or 8 more.   Some are painted directly on to walls, others on removable boards, in case the Council in their wisdom decide they should be taken down.  This is one of the new ones.

10. My own choice

My neighbour has been growing Christmas trees for the past 10 years or so, and this year I noticed the bigger ones all have these huge pine cones ... In the evening sun they look like a bunch of little animals huddling up for the night.  

So what has your month been like?  Check out the other Scavengers here.  

Thanks again Hawthorn. 

Ireland's Own

Earlier in the year, I spent one Saturday morning going through a pile of Ireland's Own magazines, cutting out items of interest and saving the song sheets from them.

Ireland's Own is a weekly magazine/newspaper which has been printed weekly since 1902.
It's a mixture of short stories, bits of folklore, corny jokes, items of historical interest, stories about entertainers, or poets or artists, usually something about nature and a song sheet in every edition with words of old Irish songs and well known old pop songs.

I've always been a hoarder of "useless information" and Ireland's Own is the mother of useless information, a lot of it Irish based.   Great fun.  

The one I'm looking at right now is from August 2011 and there's an item on one of the great Showband singers, Sean Dunphy; an item about President Obama's visit to Ireland; the story behind the Award 'The Freedom of Dublin'; The Shipping Forecast; the Irish in WW2 (a series throughout the year); If you Feel Like Singing - Sing an Irish Song - featuring the words of Old Skibereen and Bantry Bay among others; the ancient tribes of Ireland; Mrs Frances Alexander who wrote the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful; all of this along with memories, short stories, gardening and a page for pen friends.

I might drop in the odd bit of nonsense from it in the coming months.

Are there any traditional type magazines or newspapers in your area?   I'd love to hear about them.

Sunday Catch Up

I loved this statue in Kilmarnock

My life has been very much in two parts over most of this year - writing and preparing a new CD in the weeks my energy has been good, and lots of knitting, bits of reading blogs and even more reading books during the months when it wasn't.    

I've knit lots of pieces both for myself and for my friend Belinda's craft shop and had a much longed for excuse to experiment and have fun with different weights and textures of yarn.   My dream has always been to have a go at designing but my knowledge of textiles and drape wasn't great - I've learned a lot.  So I suppose that's one thing to be thankful for for a prolonged bout of whatever it was I had/have.   

But for now, it's the last days of Summer, and we're both looking forward to a short holiday in Brittany - cannot wait.  And with luck, fingers and toes crossed, we'll get some sunshine to get the Vitamin D levels up for the colder days.

The focus of this next winter is going to be rest and health but hopefully with enough energy for new term time adventures with Singmarra, a trip to England to do some gigs in November and our new CD - Together - which will be released in September.



Blogwise I've been going through, and deleting or editing a lot of drafts that for some reason didn't get posted, so I'm feeling a little bit prepared for the next few weeks at least.

But for now, cough cough achoo - back to bed.

Have a lovely week and a great start to the Autumn.

Just some of my reading
in past months - might even
get around to reviewing
some of them

The Flying Seagulls #WATWB

I am joining in today with the We Are The World Blogfest - a monthly burst of blogging across the Internet to bring Positive News to everyone's attention.  

In Darkness, Be Light.  

The plight of refugees never seems to be far from the news these days and this story just lifted my heart.  

It's about a group of musicians, play specialists, clowns and circus entertainers who travel into refugee camps to bring a smile to the faces of the children. 

They are called The Flying Seagulls Project 

No matter what the circumstances or where they have come from, children deserve to have fun and this band of troubadours have made it their mission in life to help the kids do that - to remind them that they are children.  

The story was featured on BBC Three and was shared around Facebook.  

See the video from BBC Three here and there are lots more videos on their website.










The co-hosts of this month's We Are The World Blogfest are :

Simon Falk, 
Roshan Radhakrishnan,
Inderpreet Uppal, 
Lynn Hallbrooks,
Eric Lahti,
Mary J Giese

Check out theirs and other stories on the Facebook thread here

Get ready for Oulo

Have you ever, or did you ever, or do you ever hold an imaginary guitar in your hand and rock it out to a song on the radio?    It's like an instinct for my generation I think.   But would you go as far as taking part in a competition?

Well today marks the start of the Air Guitar World Championships!  In Oulu, northern Finland, which has become synonymous with the competition.   There have been preliminary rounds happening all over the world since April ... I kid you not.  

This is a video of the winner from last year.   I could only cope with watching about 5 seconds of it :) see how far you can get .... These guys look so geeky but they're really funny and having great craic.  

Have fun.   

The White Beach

The story behind the song

The coast of each country usually belongs to the Crown or the government, so we were really surprised years back when a very wealthy landowner near here closed off access to parts of the beach making it impossible to walk past his estate.   He gradually bought up more and more of the shore, shutting off access as he went.

One of these areas was known as the White Beach and was accessed via a lane from the main road which passed a wetland field, known locally as the Pond Field, and you came out onto a headland called the Moat, to get onto this piece of beach.  I had only ever walked on it a couple of times, but a few years ago we were heading down for a walk and were met with a huge barbed wire fence.

So a local campaign started to get it opened up again. However the wealthy man, in the style of landowners of old, just hired plenty of lawyers and kept the case open in the courts hoping people would run out of steam.   Eventually though, the case was won by the people and he agreed to a compromise, to build an extra walkway.

Now in the middle of this a couple of things happened - we wrote a song about people's memories of summer picnics there; sang it at the festival and got a good response to it, but had decided not to really rant about this man's involvement, only that it was no longer open to the public.  A few months later we decided, as the court case was coming up, to just go for it and have a good old folkie rant about injustice and so on.

But, just as we finished it the man in question died - in a horrible helicopter accident - and no matter what people thought of him and his ways before hand, no-one, including ourselves, were prepared to talk ill of the dead.

Anyway, we finally finished it and recorded it a few years back, leaving out blame and just making it into a nostalgic ballad about a place rather than a landlord .... enough of those stories have been told in Ireland over the years.

I'd love to know what you think of the story... Here are the lyrics.

The White Beach (Campbell/McFarland)

The story of an event that happened near us, where people were up in arms that the local landlord had closed off access to a favourite beach

Walking by the sea today

I wandered back in time

I can still recall my father’s hand

Holding on to mine

And the first time that he took me

To a hidden piece of shore

That his own father showed to him

Many years before

He told me lots of stories
from the time he was a lad

About family summer Sundays
with the picnics on the strand

And about the Yankee soldiers
that stayed there in the war

Who danced at Ballyedmond and walked with sweethearts on the shore

Chorus

And he said
“Walk with me to the white beach

And we'll walk there one more time

Come and walk with me to the white beach

And I'll take your hand in mine

Come and walk with me to the white beach

Past the Pond Field on the way

We'll cross the moat together

Come and walk with me today”

Then he told me of the anger
when the landlord closed the way

And a fence was built around the Moat and the Pond Field drained away

He couldn’t understand
just how they failed to see

What the lovely White Beach
meant to you and me

Chorus

Now I’m thinking of the white beach

In my mind’s eye I can see

That lonely stretch of strand

That holds such memories for m

And when I’m on a foreign shore

With children of my own

I’ll tell them of the White Beach

Close to my Rostrevor home.  

And I’ll say

Chorus

Fro the CD Back There (2015)