the price of a pint dictates all

Hurray, it’s May!

I was away a lot in April, hence the absence of entries. Last month was unpredictable, rather like our famous Spring weather, and I’m glad it’s over.

That last sentence evokes in my mind T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in two ways:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which was on in Galway last week. I managed to wrangle time for one event: a lunch-time play, Too Much of Nothing, which was written by Mark O’Halloran and David Wilmot.

The 40-minute drama revolves around wannabe poet, Christy, who is finally overcoming his writer’s block in a local café. He is joined by Dominick, whose distracting influence and deluge of stories about the evils of coffee, girlfriend abandonment, and the entomology of words eventually helps Christy crack his epic. It’s a light-hearted and funny one-act play, that was well acted, and the simple setting was perfect for the intimate Ruby Room in the King’s Head pub. It was great entertainment for a fiver – or, as a friend of mine put it, the price of pint of Guinness.

Irish people tend to equate the value of money in relation to how many pints of Guinness you can purchase with it.

“Hmm, that’s a two pints of Guinness novel! It better be worth it.”