Will this do instead of a postcard?
So... here we are again; back from "holiday", all tanned and foreign-looking. A substantial post, this one, since I've been away. So it'll be hiding .
What a cracking week. I've been to Drumshanbo every year for the last fourteen years. I've seen a lot of changes. Pubs have come and gone. Whole buildings have been demolished. A marina got built. I found a lot of new friends. I lost contact with some, grew closer to others. One or two are no longer with us, some have brought new lives into the world. Some of the people have children now who are now taller than me. Ok, so that isn't that difficult, really, but it's just an example.
I sometimes have the feeling that I'm skipping through time - the place and the people are so familiar that when I'm there, I don't feel like a year could possibly have gone by in between. And so kids that I first knew when they were teenagers are through university and working. It's scary. And I just keep on skipping on, year after year, getting older and watching things change.
One thing that's never changed, though, is the welcome, the hospitality, and the respect that people have for each other; the closeness and sense of community that you get from sharing a town for a week to play music, drink wonderful Guinness, and talk bollocks into the wee small hours.
Makes you think.
Certainly makes me think, anyway. I go to the same place, year after year, just to play music and meet people. Somehow, for that one week in the year, that's when I feel most alive, most like myself. And it makes me regret sitting on my increasingly fat backside doing nothing very much for the last five years. If I had half the gumption that I have over there, half the determination to get on and do what I need to do, I'd have been out of here like a shot before I got conned into thinking it was a worthwhile "career choice".
Before I went on holiday, I'd been a bit worried about going. It's been six months - nearly seven - since I went to a session in Glasgow. I've had music elsewhere, and most of it has been great, but I haven't been to my local session since January. I had been wondering if I was going to be out of practice, whether I'd still be able to play, whether I'd have regressed to scrawping the strings like a tortured cat...
It took ten seconds.
Ten seconds after I'd picked up the fiddle I was right back, as if I'd never been away. As if there's something about just being in Leitrim that makes me remember how I used to be able to play, instead of feeling endlessly frustrated and tired and pissed off with the egos that some people seem to have over here about their own playing. And I just think to myself, "I used to be like that about writing, once, and I still feel a bit like that. Maybe I need that ten seconds to happen again, just in a different way..."
One thing's for certain - I can't spend the rest of my days skipping from one year to the next, living for one week a year. Things have got to change.
So here I am, fast approaching thirty, and finally I'm becoming determined to bloody well do something with my life...
Wish you were here,
Lots of Love,
Monkey.
_
What a cracking week. I've been to Drumshanbo every year for the last fourteen years. I've seen a lot of changes. Pubs have come and gone. Whole buildings have been demolished. A marina got built. I found a lot of new friends. I lost contact with some, grew closer to others. One or two are no longer with us, some have brought new lives into the world. Some of the people have children now who are now taller than me. Ok, so that isn't that difficult, really, but it's just an example.
I sometimes have the feeling that I'm skipping through time - the place and the people are so familiar that when I'm there, I don't feel like a year could possibly have gone by in between. And so kids that I first knew when they were teenagers are through university and working. It's scary. And I just keep on skipping on, year after year, getting older and watching things change.
One thing that's never changed, though, is the welcome, the hospitality, and the respect that people have for each other; the closeness and sense of community that you get from sharing a town for a week to play music, drink wonderful Guinness, and talk bollocks into the wee small hours.
Makes you think.
Certainly makes me think, anyway. I go to the same place, year after year, just to play music and meet people. Somehow, for that one week in the year, that's when I feel most alive, most like myself. And it makes me regret sitting on my increasingly fat backside doing nothing very much for the last five years. If I had half the gumption that I have over there, half the determination to get on and do what I need to do, I'd have been out of here like a shot before I got conned into thinking it was a worthwhile "career choice".
Before I went on holiday, I'd been a bit worried about going. It's been six months - nearly seven - since I went to a session in Glasgow. I've had music elsewhere, and most of it has been great, but I haven't been to my local session since January. I had been wondering if I was going to be out of practice, whether I'd still be able to play, whether I'd have regressed to scrawping the strings like a tortured cat...
It took ten seconds.
Ten seconds after I'd picked up the fiddle I was right back, as if I'd never been away. As if there's something about just being in Leitrim that makes me remember how I used to be able to play, instead of feeling endlessly frustrated and tired and pissed off with the egos that some people seem to have over here about their own playing. And I just think to myself, "I used to be like that about writing, once, and I still feel a bit like that. Maybe I need that ten seconds to happen again, just in a different way..."
One thing's for certain - I can't spend the rest of my days skipping from one year to the next, living for one week a year. Things have got to change.
So here I am, fast approaching thirty, and finally I'm becoming determined to bloody well do something with my life...
Wish you were here,
Lots of Love,
Monkey.
_