It’s been a long week and so many things happened to be grateful for. The success of the Gift of the Gab  and the money that was raised for the orphanage. The wonderful rendition of Marie Jones Stones in his pockets by the boys from Madhouse. The fantastic turnout for the St Patrick’s Day parade, a day that culminated in the Gala Dinner. It all wrapped up with the Irish Film Festival’s showing of the Irish SciFi 100 mornings. I had two friends in for the week and saw many’s the sunrise over the course of those few days, staying up till the wee hours sitting around my kitchen table putting the world to rights over a pot of tea and a few cosmopolitans. And for all the friendship and the craic, I am grateful indeed.

But what struck me most over the past week, a week where the Irish were out en masse and the masses were on form, is the sheer versatility of the English language – when it’s in our hands!

The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man’s fate and man’s follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. ~ T E Kalem – On Brendan Behan’s 1958 play Borstal Boy, quoted in a Time advertisement, NY Times 17 Mar 1979

There were some classics:
On nervousness: It’s not as if we’re putting hearts in babies – or taking them out! On preaching: You’re not on your high horse now; you’re just on a tall donkey! On Lent: I can’t have sex – it’s lent. Okay so. Let me know when you get it back. On death: He’d gotten very small but he looked very well in the coffin.
On fashion: Sure their skirts are higher than their handbags.
On drink: The weakness in me is very strong.
On meanness: He’d mind mice at a crossroads.
On inquistiveness: She asked it all – breed, creed, and generation.
On beauty: She had calves only a cow could love.
On nerve: He’s not at all backward in coming forward.
On weight: She’s the full of his arms of Irish love.

Note to self: start carrying a notebook.