No Rest for the Wicked Mummy

A very busy week this week, talk about hitting the ground running! I went up to Belfast on Tuesday employing my usual method of two-birds-one-stone.

I saw American Music Club in the Empire and got to talk poetry the next morning for almost two hours. AMC were astonishing. I've heard Mark Eitzel sing on his abums; especially Love Songs for Patriots, which I brought home from San Francisco in 2005, but nothing had prepared me for the delivery he gives live. Woah - I was near blown off me seat by the emotion he packs into his gorgeous Guinness velvet voice (I may be a little smitten).

I started reading about AMC's stormy history when I got back to my friend's house; it is she who is obsessed with them, having god knows how many of the albums, books and there's more coming, she told me yesterday. Safe to say, I think she is a fan. And now I am one too!

Wednesday, after said poetry chat, off to Dublin for the second leg of the all-singing all-dancing Babsie tour of Ireland. I was going to Poetry Ireland's launch for three Salmon books just out this year: Kevin Higgin's 'Time Gentlemen, Please,' Lorna Shaughnessy's 'Torching the Brown River,' and Susan Millar DuMars's 'Big Pink Umbrella.'

A very enjoyable evening and came home with all three books, which I've loved reading for their difference to each other. I hear Salmon have brought out Todd Swift's new 'Seaways,' and Kevin and Susan will be reading with Todd, amongst many others at a gala evening in November, in London. But I jump ahead too far there!

Last night, Thursday, I visited Virginia. That's Virginia, Co. Cavan. This seemingly sleepy town has a festival of new theatre writing happening all this week. New plays have been selected for 'reading,' on stage before an audience. I believe the plays were solicited by open competition, by the Livin Dred Theatre Company, which is based in the Ramor Theatre in Virginia. This new theatre company are already beginning to get a good name for themselves and judging by the cast reading the play, 'Leopoldville,' last night, are attracting the talent too.

The play was written by Jaki McCarrick, one of the Summer School tutors. It was interesting to hear the play read, having to insert the action in our own minds. I think this play will be one to watch in the future: it's set in a border town and is a fictionlised dramatization of an appalling murder that took place about fifteen or more years ago. Five youths attacked a run-down publican in his own pub... but that's about as much info as you really need to know. The play investigates the calibre of mind of people who would do something so evil and there are lots of connections between the play and 'Heart of Darkness.' Good old Joseph Conrad.

Anyhow, enough gallivanting about in the arts world - I have a house to clean and brats to feed.

I go away for 5 minutes

...and come back to a sisterhood of the pointy heel as well as knights of besmirched countenance...

I scratch my head, momentarily and then remember that it is almost the depth of winter in the Northern hemisphere and I suppose that that may be one reason for these strange goings on.

But then, I tell myself firmly, is it really strange...? Sisters and knights have long had 'interesting' associations... just now I am thinking Keats very loudly... No 'tis not strange.

May - be

Damn. I missed all that about it turning into Bealtaine and the start of summer.

So, I went in search of something to mark it. I liked the sound of Walpurgis Night which means Witches night (I know Minx will like that), where the witches have a bit of a hooley on the mountains in Germany and all over Northern Europe generally.

But the apparitions on the Brocken mountain, where some of this shindigging goes on, sound interesting -you need the right conditions to see them - but what they are is a magnified shadow (probably a human sort), combined with the moisture in the air at a certain time of day et voila, there's a weird vision!

Makes you wonder about the Yetis on the other side of the world.

Anyhow, the one thing in common with these celebrations is that May 1 is regarded as another gateway, like Halloween, where souls of the dead are abroad, and there may be an interchange between the living and the dead.

Makes sense really.