Patricia’s Blog
The outer coast area of Cape Cod stretching from Chatham to Provincetown has been protected since President Kennedy signed the National Seashore legislation in 1961. I have just returned from a week there and offer my half-dozen ‘to-do’ list: Spend a few hours at the National Seashore visitor centre at Eastham to immerse yourself in…
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Great to see Loop Head coming out tops in the Irish Times best place to holiday in Ireland competition. I have been visiting there for over a decade and it has grown on me year after year. Just last week I walked at the water’s edge around the light house to the sound of the…
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It’s traumatic trying to select Edinburgh Fringe events and standing in the queue for the box office only makes matters worse as you’re bombarded with performers pushing their wares. But chatting in the queue can be helpful; it was great to hear so many people talk about Swimming with my Mother by Coisceim Dance Theatre ; but I’d…
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It looks like good weather for the holiday weekend in Ireland. Time for breaks and trips. I like to link text and place when travelling. As I’m heading off to County Mayo, I thought I would pull together – in a fairly random way – some of my favourite texts linked to some wonderful Mayo…
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I was back In Achill recently when the wind roared and the Atlantic churned and the mist hid the outlines of Slievemore. I did a quick car tour of some literary haunts. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries writers and visual artists flocked to Achill, helped by the extension of the railway line to the…
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I made it on the very last day. The Moderns – the major exhibition of the Arts in Ireland in the 20th century at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Arts (IMMA). It covered modernity in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s through the visual arts mainly, but with photographers, film-makers, composers, architects, designers –…
Read MoreFor six months now I’ve been posting an occasional ‘half-dozen list’ on reading and writing and literary bits and pieces. I looked back over them today and found I had a half-dozen such lists. So I’ve put them all together as a half-dozen literary bunch. Here they are: Book Club Reads: A Half-Dozen Selection…
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It was one of my books for Christmas. The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. And it was my recommended read for our book club this month. But they’re a stubborn crowd, my book club lot. They know their own minds. What did they think of the book? Took a long while to get into.…
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This is my half-dozen list of books from Ireland or by Irish writers that I think would make great Christmas gifts. And not a whiff of misery writing about the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger or the sorry IMF/ECB bailout. Emma Donoghue’s Room was my book of the year before it won the Hughes & Hughes…
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Read on the New Urban Habitat blog about six fun ways to spend a cold, dark night and get through these days of stark, depressing economic news. Read aloud to one another. Tell a story. And more suggestions for these windy nights.
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