Quattro Stagioni

Impressive snow flurries on Thursday

Ah, the 'Four Seasons' - but not those well known four concerti by Vivaldi. I was actually remembering my favourite choice of pizza topping from my youth when (I can't remember why or with whom) we'd head off en-masse to a chain pizza restaurant in Maidstone. The internet now tells me that a Quattro Stagioni pizza "traditionally" featured ham, artichoke, mushrooms and olives to represent the four seasons though I swear I can remember pine-apple for summer. Ah well. That was Kent and decades ago, so maybe they are not the right kind of 'traditional'.

That is just the ancient memory. The up to date use is a comment on the wry Irish take on the weird weather that we have had this week - that you get all four seasons in the same day - rain, hail and snow, drizzle and then bright sunshine with blue skies and puffy cumulus cloud. The coat, hat and gloves you put on to counter the 'winter' are suddenly way too warm as the sun comes out and the wind dies away, until the next squall. I managed to capture a couple of pics of snow, but snow is notoriously tricky to do justice to falling. You have to try to force the flash to go off to illuminate the nearby flakes, but it was so bright, my various auto settings refused to do that. I had to crop in on bits of dark - an open barn doorway or a grey concrete block wall.

Nugget, Goldie's daughter, is still free range and we are letting
her be so. She does not seem to be doing any damage. 

We are mindful, of course, that somewhere out there in all this wintriness is poor Barbara, our turkey hen. At least, we hope so. We hope she is hidden up well in a hedge somewhere and that her instincts have made her choose a place under cover and out of the wind. Maybe there will also be the fast-growing cow parsley (Queen Anne's Lace) around her so that she will be more and more protected as time goes by and Brer Fox will not happen upon her (or his mink and pine-marten cousins). We will never know if she is taken by a fox, of course; we will only know she hasn't if she wanders back in here with or without some chicks. Fingers crossed. Barbara!

Two lovely things happened to me this week - Liz came home and my archery stuff arrived on the courier (EXPD) from the UK. Liz had thoroughly enjoyed catching up with all the cousins on that side of the family - they are all Irish and at one stage all came to squeeze into Liz's family home when she was 8-ish prior to emigrating (back) to Swindon.

Pointy end and nock ends of my new arrows. €10 a pop. 

'Little-Liz' loved having all these wonderful new play-mates descend upon her, sharing bedrooms and toys etc like one huge family. She gravitated particularly to Cathy as she was closest in age and stayed in Ireland longest and they have been great friends ever since. Returning from the funeral it seemed to be a decent sized cup of tea that she missed most about home. No problem. Get the kettle on,

My archery stuff arrived while she was still away, coming from Quick's Archery of Portsmouth (UK) and delivered by the courier EXPD. I was sure I'd not heard of the latter but the guy, when he rocked up, told me he had not needed to ask directions because he "knew us". Anyway, I can heartily recommend both these firms if you are ever in the bow and arrow buying business. It was all nice and safely packaged and arrived intact, safe and sound and complete and within days of being ordered.

A handy kit bag for the gear. Not sure If the dozen
29 inch arrows will fit in it, mind.

Of course, like a kid at Christmas, I had to unpack it all and see what I had there. I had to assemble the bow, don the glove and wanted to lash off a trial arrow just to make sure it all worked. But what to use as a target? Anything solid and wooden, the arrow would surely sink in an inch or so and be a pain to extract. The arrows are €10 each, and have thin-ish wooden shafts, so you'd not want to break one trying to wiggle it out. Stones and rocks in any mud-banks would just shatter the arrow on impact. Maybe that big pile of shredded (felled) tree would stop it. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Apple blossom nearly open.

Well, I nearly lost the arrow. The shredded wood pile was so fluffy and loose that the arrow almost disappeared. All 29 inches bar about an eighth of an inch of 'nock' (back end) zoomed in and it was only that I saw the puff of the dry surface shavings jump, leaving a small darker patch of the inside bits in the middle of which was my yellow, plastic nock, or I would have been dismantling the pile to find my arrow. That was enough of an explore. I will try again when I have dreamt up a denser target; maybe more of those wood shavings rammed hard down into a big feed- or coal-sack.

Pear blossom.

I am in a strange kind of limbo on archery now - midway between my beginner training course and my onward practise, between using the club 28 lb pull bow and my beefier 35-40 lb pull own bow and between the indoor, badminton court training sessions and the club's summer outdoor archery. Rather than have me loosing off arrows out of doors as a first introduction to my new bow, the instructor has allowed me to come and 'play' outside with my familiar club bow.

Our local bridge with the river running very low. 

But that is all to come. Sunday's job is for a gang of us to head round to his farm and help set up the outdoor course including the marquee we will use for coffee breaks. I am told the guy tries to set up quite an interesting course as near as possible to the kind of 'field archery' course you would meet in a competition; varied targets including the 3D animal models marked with heart/lungs they use as well as normal targets, all at a variety of ranges and some uphill and downhill by means of the 'tee' position or the target being up on pallets or mounds. Sounds like fun. I will be able to tell you more after Sunday (weather permitting)

A Bit of Culture

Pictures in this post are by Keith Nolan Photography, first published in Facebook.

On Friday evening we were invited by Vendor Anna to attend an evening of choral singing performed by Carrick on Shannon's Millennium Choir in which Anna sings. This was a lovely opportunity to get out of the grungy farm clothes for a change, scrub up and go and do 'posh', or at least 'respectable'. These evenings are very popular and the tickets (only a €-tenner) sell out; the choir which has been going since 1998 is very highly regarded locally and has attracted some high class talent. They regularly get to sing with invited professional singers, they have a very good quality orchestra and are even getting pieces written especially for them.

Having said all that, readers who know me will know that I do not normally 'do' choirs, I am not a great fan of operatic warblings, especially up in the soprano range and was very undecided whether I would enjoy the event or whether it might become a 'duty'. I am also badly ignorant of the music and will not remember half the names, and there was no programme or song-list. I am, therefore rather nervously going to try to do the show justice in this blog-post but if anyone (especially Anna) spots any howlers then please do comment or email me.

Anna and Paul had set us up well - we had tickets, instructions not to bother trying to park in the main street but instead use the Landmark Hotel's car-park, and an offer by Paul to hold seats for us. The latter we should have accepted but we declined - we don't want to be any trouble, we said, we'll manage; we'll sit where we get put. If anyone was put off coming by the vile wind and rain, then it did not show - the church was crammed with all seats taken (I'd guess around 6-700 souls) even by the time we arrived (19:45) so we mucked in helping bring some stacking chairs to the back of the church before nabbing 2 of these! Even so, there were still plenty of people standing at the back leaning on the walls or the baptismal font. We sat at the back by the font. This was not ideal as there were to be a couple of inset pieces by small children singing, traditional musicians including a harpist, 2 dancers and by a couple of little ones doing trad Irish dancing. None of this could we see except for the boy-dancer's head bobbing up and down. Neither could we see the orchestra.

 Well the choir definitely looked the part, the gents in best bib and tucker with purple bow ties and the ladies were in purple robes. An energetic MC lady in orange did the honours on introducing songs (and, as I said, Thank Heavens for that, as I would not have had a clue. As it is I am typing from memory; you couldn't really take notes!).

(The 'show' included a huge range of types of music and styles. We started with a romping rendition of 76 Trombones and worked our way through some religious stuff ( for example a Vivaldi 'Gloria'), old show tunes  and film songs (Talk to the Animals), the lovely 'Barcelona' by Freddie Mercury, with a really fine coloratura lady taking the Monserrat Caballe part. and there were pop songs like Bridge Over Troubled Water and older ones including If I Ruled the World. We loved the timeless Old Man River which made good use of the bass section. There was a beautiful anthem about Carrick town written for them by a local professional musician (a young lady but sorry, no memory of her name) which was very catchy and had lovely echoes of a Chris Wood English folk song (Sing, John Ball and tell it to them all. Long live the day that is dawning. And I'll crow like a cock, I'll carol like a lark. For the life that is coming in the morning). There was a whole section out of the musical-du-jour Les Miserables which I must admit is not a favourite, but they were all well done and I did like the march "Hear the People Sing". 

The audience loved it. The Irish do  have a passion for their music. One big solid old boy leaning on 'our' font as if it was the local bar had tears in his eyes as a youthful female soloist sang a Puccini piece. The applause was loud after each song and massive at the end. The final song was The Easter Hymn and by then it was approaching 11 pm so I will admit we slipped out at that stage, sprinting for the car rather than be caught in traffic. If there was an encore, then we missed it, but the orange MC lady did say "Safe Home" so we think not. So that was that - home by midnight to a nice welcome from the dogs, a warming shot of whisky and a coffee.

So, Thank You very much for thinking of us, Anna and obtaining tickets. We had a lovely evening and you were all brilliant. Thank you, too, Keith Nolan Photography who has granted me permission to use these pictures.