Fuse your souls into one and be happy for the love you have been so fortunate to find in one another

Corinthians

and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

WB Yeats, ‘Among School Children’

My friend was married this weekend to her boy, under the bluest skies seen since June. They met when we were young, when our respective futures were wide open and everything was new. They stayed together while the rest of us fell in and out of like with the boys who found themselves in our tangled webs. On Friday they walked out of a church into blinding sun and a bright future, surrounded by their family and friends.

Happy doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel about their union. It renewed me. While I want to rant a little about some traditions that hurt my feminist sensibilities I can now only confess to my tears when I saw her walk down the aisle, my happiness when I hugged her outside the church and my weird sense of pride because she is so strong and proud and sure of her choices and her love and their love for each other and its amazing power to make everything right when things go wrong.

Today I am a cheerleader for love and marriage. I am a believer, a convert, a follower. If you have your doubts, watch this.

The day that Henry Rollins* says to me

Thanks, I appreciate your mind.

is the day I die happy.

*Cakeface hates him. My mission in life is to change that.

Watching ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ late at night….

Two words I am slowly growing to hate. Two words people tag onto the end of notices hoping to hide the fact that “all” are very much not welcome. If you announce something – a pig race or a cocktail party – in a public sphere then the percieved wisdom is that it is open to the public. But then, at the end, is your qualifier. Yes, it’s a public event but it’s not for the public. It’s for locals, regulars, people you see every day and it is very much not open to the scary, all-consuming “all” that is our brave new world. 

Moving home has opened my eyes to the provincialism that still exists in the badlands of our fair isle. Local notices say things like “we have decided every house in the parish must pay €5 toward the upkeep of the church each week. Further discussion will not be entered into. Everyone will use the church at some stage in their lives”. God is still bothering people in Deliverance-land. Curtain twitching busybodies rule with muslin-clothed iron fists and privacy is best kept for holidays away from the villages of squinting windows. 

It makes me yearn for a city. An anonymous world where people don’t raise an eyebrow at a surname that isn’t “local” and when a poster is tagged to a telegraph pole everyone is welcome, regardless of what part of the “all” matrix they fall into. 

I guess I’m glad when a neighbour signs for a parcel or helps with a flat tyre but, most of the time, I daydream about Bruce Springsteen-Born to Run-ing my ass out of here.

Whaddya think of this?

Wave Machines had some technical difficulties during their set yesterday at Castlepalooza that distracted from the fact that they’re sort of awesome. Though it was nice to learn that their favourite colour is red during the impromptu q&a session. The more useless information I know, the happier I am.
Anyway. Listen here, website here, follow here. See for yourself how dancetastic great they are.

We’re not a flag waving nation. Not really. Counties wave flags on match days and fans carry the tricolour across Europe for soccer games but they’re not pitched in our gardens. It’s a complicated relationship, all tied up in history and war and that space between the two. Seeing it perched atop crumbling old Charleville Castle this weekend was heart warming, in a way that forgot the history, the flag waving hoorahs and the sometime fear we have of being too closely associated with the the green beside the white and gold.