A year of festivals in Ireland : an epic tale of meandering misadventure and anti-economics

Meet Mark Graham, Conker Champion of Ireland, All-Ireland Bucket-Singing Champion and the sixth-best bog snorkeler in Ireland. Rejected by the banks as he looked to start on the journey to home ownership, Mark started in an altogether more interesting and exciting journey to attend three festivals a week for a year. In this entertaining roller-coaster tour of Ireland, Mark paints a picture not of a broken and maudlin country that lost the run of itself, but of a people with a wealth of character, imagination, generosity, wildness, curiosity, creativity and an insatiable hunger for fun and divilment. The surprising array of weird and wonderful festivals around Ireland are matched and surpassed by the cohort of characters and clients who attend them. Throwing himself into the thick of these gatherings may have nearly killed him, but he survived his year of festivals, enjoyed almost every minute and was left with a tale or two to tell. The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind is a new collection by Billy O'Callaghan that explores everyday existence in the aftermath of cataclysms both subtle and overt. The characters who populate these stories are people afflicted by life and circumstance, hauled from some idyll and confronted with such real world problems as divorce, miscarriage, cancer, desertion, bereavement and the disintegration of love. From the tale of an institutionalised orphan boy in 1950s Ireland sold into servitude as a farm labourer, to the Sevillian matador who in a single misstep has fallen into a life of obscurity, and on through to the poignant title story of a man returning to his island home to see again the child that he abandoned, these are stories about picking up the shattered pieces and finding among them some glint of value, and some way to survive. In The Second Coming, Yeats wrote: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold." Yet here the reader is offered evidence to the contrary, with the suggestion that the human heart boasts extraordinary resilience and is possessed of an ability to find redemption in the most unexpected of places. In the face of tragedy we re-evaluate ourselves. We bear the guilt, sorrow and regret for the things we have lost or given up, we seek the light, and we endure. These thirteen stories attempt to illuminate the darkness. Cover; Halftitle; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgement; Introduction; 1 - On a Mission from God; 2 - September - Bog Warriors and The Runs; 3 - October - All Hail the Conkering Hero; 4 - November - Laughter is preferable to tears; 5 - December - A Poxy Christmas; 6 - January - Spinning, Science and Sessions; 7 - Februrary - Thy Kingdom Come and Priestly Fun; 8 - March - Half a Pig's Head for the Ramblon Mon; 9 - April - City of the Dead, Town of the Deranged; 10 - May - Cheoil in the Bucket; 11 - June - Buckfast 'n' Blues; 12 - July - Little Fluffy Clouds and Diluted Orange