Listowel Writer's Week 2014 and other stories

Hello again.

The less said about April's high hopes for a solid month of daily blog entries, the better.  I should probably have set the bar a little bit lower.  Maybe three a week.  I might try that this month.  No promises, let's see what happens.

News-wise, I suppose I probably should let you know that the relationship with Anne-Sophie that I introduced just seven entries ago has, sadly, come to an end.  'Ran out of road', as the man says.  I am confident that we will remain good friends.

One thing I have since discovered about myself that I am quite bad at relaying this information to people who I should probably inform - don't really like talking about my personal life (just rather spew it all onto the internet, I suppose).  'People I should inform' really means the people who know both of us, or who I work with, who during the course of a conversation will ask how she is.  Now, if they phrase it, 'How's herself?'  or similar, this leaves me open to divulge that there is no longer a 'herself', but that Anne-Sophie is fine, which is grand.  What tends to happen, though is that people will ask, 'How's Anne-Sophie?', and so I launch into the answer of the question, 'Happy out now, sure she's found a new job and it's going well,' etc, and the further I get into it the harder it gets to then add the news about the break-up.  Ah well, word will get around soon enough I suppose.

Now, for Writer's Week, which is probably why you're reading this (that being the title).  I have been working in Listowel for years, and have been around for Writer's Week most of them, but when I was living outside of town, coming in to see what was happening on my nights off seemed like too much hassle, when I wasn't really sure if there'd be anything I'd be interested in.  Now that I'm within easy walking distance from all the events, though, I'm sorry I didn't make the effort before. 

Thursday night was the only night that I expected to have off, and I was caught up between doing the Literary Pub Trail at 8 pm, described in the leaflet as a "drama-filled trail of the hosteleries of Listowel", and a play in St. John's at 8:30 pm.  In the end, my friend and I decided that we'd start out on the Pub Trail, which was free, and if it was shite, we'd skip on over to St. John's, as we'd be setting off in the Square anyway. Thankfully the Abbeyfeale Drama Group put on an excellent show for us on our tour of the pubs, and we didn't even think about jumping ship (just as well, as the queue for the play was out the door, so there wasn't much chance of getting seats).  The drama provided were amusing scenes from the plays of John B. Keane, most of which I hadn't seen before, and all of which made me want to see the whole thing when I get the chance. I did notice that in the first pub (Christy's - where we were treated to an early scene from The Field), most of the crowd bought drinks, and had time to get them down, but as we progressed the interval between venues became tighter.  The bar that seemed to do the worst out of this was probably Mike the Pie's, as it was the third bar on the trail, and the penultimate destination.  The scene from Moll that was performed in the Saddle previously had been shorter than the first, I think, so people may have had to knock back their drinks.  That is only a theory I developed to explain why so many of the audience in Mike the Pie's seemed to be without a glass in hand, a phenomenon I hadn't remarked on in the others.  I would assume that Brosnan's did well out of the fact that it was the last venue and thus had a good few people stay on after the scene from Big Maggie.  If I had to chose one of the acts we saw, my favourite would have to have been the scene from The Chastitute, it seems like an hilarious play which I look forward to catching in full at the next possible opportunity.  Thank you, Abbeyfeale Drama Group, for a marvelous evening.

Finished the evening off in John B. Keane's pub (where else would you finish up for Writer's Week) and enjoyed the banter and atmosphere.  I did feel a bit out of place at first, as I didn't have floppy hair, a cravat, a waistcoat or a pocket watch, but I got used to it.

The highlight of the week, for me was last night, which I will proceed to tell you in a separate post.