No I haven't been here for going on two months. And a quick check of this blog's stats show that, if anything, readership has gone up in my absence.
The less I write the more readers I get?
Some message there, best not go too deeply.
One of the things I've been busy with is a military ceremony to honour the memory of my wife's late father, an Irish Army officer. And here she is, walking ahead of some troops on the way to unveiling a plaque in Admiral Brown Park in County Mayo's Foxford. And yes she is the same woman who appears on the cover and in the pages of my best selling A Walk On The South Side.
And here are some more pictures. For which I am grateful to Lam Lee who came all the way from Toronto to the ceremony. And that's her (guess which?) with Jane Edwards who came from the UK. Both for family connection reasons. We're a widely scattered bunch. And yes those are glasses on the table of Brennan's Lane Restaurant, pride of Ballina nightlife.
And here is Colonel Aherne, making his speech at the ceremony, the band in the background.
Yes it all went well.
Also in my absence from this blog location, three new books of mine were published. Not one, not two, but three. This may sound magnificent but one of them (Fragments from Frescati) had been hanging round for quite some time, awaiting its moment. That moment has now come. Fragments from Frescati is now in the bookshop, as is Boy on A Bicycle. Details of these on my website. (Non fiction, they probably won't be E for awhile.) The third is the print version of the novel The Snake Dancer of Sati Choura. That has available as an EBook for a few months, though with a different cover. Same words.
There I was at home to find that the local population are celebrating the nineteenth century composer William Vincent Wallace. They're not exactly dancing in the streets but a committee is up to things, concerts and talks and the likes. This I found interesting because my book Fragments from Frescati has two pages on the same William Vincent. Also interesting because William Vincent was son of an army bandmaster and I had just come from being entertained by an Irish army band.
It all hangs together.
William Vincent Wallace is described in the publicity material for the shindig here as "colourful".
That he was. As teacher of music in a convent he ran away with one of the schoolgirls to Australia, fathered two children on her, abandoned her to a life of poverty and went about his business. Which was pretty damn murky.
OK. Those who have already read A Walk On The South Side. will know that I also married a schoolgirl and thus should cease casting aspersions.
Yeah but I didn't abandon her to a life of poverty. I share it with her.
And, more importantly, being kind of classy, we went to America, not Australia.
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