Author returns, alive, from the Dromineer Literary Festival!

Well, I'm back in Berlin after six days in Ireland. Verrrrrry tired... But happy.

The excuse for the trip was an invitation to read at the Dromineer Literary Festival, on the shore of Lough Derg, in  the heart of Tipperary, and therefore Ireland, and thus the universe. The festival was great, though at several points I wasn't sure if I'd survive it. I spent a good chunk of my childhood only a few miles away from Dromineer, and "The Orphan and the Mob", which I planned to read, is set just up the road and (with its pissed-off priests, pissed-on politicians, rampaging farmers, murderous orphans and burning orphanages) does not perhaps project the image of Tipperary of which Fáilte Ireland approves.

It turned out I was reading alongside Andrew Nugent, a white-haired monk of the order of St Benedict, and Prior at Glenstal Abbey.I wasn't quite sure how a seventy-something senior monk would react to the brutal deaths by coat-hook, boiling lead etc, of the Brothers of Jesus Christ Almighty. But it turned out he had been a trial lawyer before he was a monk, and he writes murder mysteries full of savage killings, so he was fine about it.

We read to over a hundred people (they had to get the emergency chairs out of storage, and wipe the dust off them, always a good sign). I read "The Orphan and the Mob", and it went down... No, I shan't drag out the suspense. It went down REALLY well. The audience got all the jokes and local references, and laughed even more than the audience at Charleston (in distant Sussex, far from the centre of the universe) the previous weekend. It was an advantage that most of those listening in Dromineer were familiar with, say,  Ardcroney, and had sampled its many wonders and delights. So a mention of it wasn't just a name; it summonsed in them beatific visions of the petrol station, the graveyard, the grass growing on the roof of Mick Reddan's house, and that huge rough cylindrical stone that cows scratch against (in the field at the bottom of the hill on the Nenagh side of Ardcrony)...

Great Q&A session afterwards too. Energetic, slightly terrifying, and thus enjoyable. It got off to a fine start when a man in a tweed jacket stood up and said that, as a Cloughjordan farmer, he felt he had to ask what I had against Cloughjordan farmers. I said I'd nothing against them, and that I thought they came out of the story particularly well. Didn't I describe them as sophisticated, and into Radiohead? It was hardly my fault they were beaten to death by orphans.

(Later, in the bar, a woman leaned over and whispered "Sure, that man isn't a Cloughjordan farmer at all. He's a Borrisokane farmer." )

 
 
Afterwards, I signed a reassuringly large number of books. One of the last to come up was a giant red-faced priest, who introduced himself by saying "I am a great admirer, a GREAT admirer, of Eamonn DeValera... and I am the  Priest for Puckane Parish... and I must say..." He leaned in closer, till our noses were nearly touching... "I enjoyed myself enormously! That was marvellous stuff! We're proud of you! Keep it up!"

I signed Father Slattery's book with a trembling hand. A mighty man. His brother, Martin "Speedy" Slattery used to teach me (though what subject I cannot now recall, as I was paying no attention at the time). Education was a simpler business back then. He would hit me with a hurley, and I would threaten to take him to the European Court of Human Rights. Ah, those were the days.