dovegreyreader scribbles

And on the seventh day...

...she rested whilst the heavens opened and Man built his roof, and verily Man and Chippy were drenched and wished they had built an ark.

But Man has made good progress since his project beginneth and the dovegrey was pleased and saw the sign in the sky,

thus proving that at the end of every rainbow there might not be always be crock of gold, but sometimes there is indeed a  Branwolery.

Dublin & the famine ship

I couldn't have chosen a better book to read for the week of my trip to Ireland than Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, with its cast of characters aboard a famine ship en route for New York in 1847; add in the unique narrative structure and a wide range of voices and this made the perfect travelling book for me through last week's Bristol, London and Dublin excursions. Trains and planes reached their destinations long before I was ready to arrive, buses came around the corner too soon. Each time I closed the book I would think ahead to my next reading opportunity... the Piccadilly Line to Finsbury Park, several stops time for a chapter, the 6am train to the airport, time for another one.
The only excuse I can offer for not reading it before might have been the Richard & Judy endorsement which seems to backfire a little here, slap that badge on a book and I'm afraid I don't feel tempted to read it. But in mitigation for that bout of book snobbery I do remember Bob Geldof jumping up and down on the R&J sofa, probably telling us all to $£%&*$  well go and read it, which might not have helped either.
A visit on the afternoon of my arrival to the National Photographic Archive in Dublin proved to be a fascinating introduction to a city and a country I've already confessed I knew little about beyond what I'd read in fiction, and try as I may I can't recall this being part of the school history syllabus either, probably quietly censored back in the 1960s. So Power & Privilege - Photographs of The Big House in Ireland 1858-1922 proved to be a very revealing glimpse into 'how the other half lived', especially bearing in mind that the following day I was deep into the history and distress of the potato famine and the mass emigration that was happening at about the same time.
The contrast could not have been greater and it all added to a slightly uncomfortable sense of collective and inherited national guilt that I felt as I looked at the pictures...to be honest I'm amazed the Irish Republic let the English in, let alone be so warm and welcoming towards them.
Between 1845 and 1851 the population had fallen from 8.5 million to 6.57 million as a result of the famine deaths and the exodus of survivors to the Land of Promise, the US and Canada, and by 1855 two million people are thought to have fled in that direction.
But there was life going on as usual in The Big Houses.
The posed photos of immaculately uniformed household staff, the lavish dinner parties, the hunting, shooting and fishing, with the life of indulgent privilege lived around the big estates which presumably had the wealth to survive the famine, which sadly many did not.
Not surprising to see that so many of the houses no longer existed, a large number seemed to succumb to fire.
So having taken the executive decision on Saturday afternoon not to take the trip out to Sandymount,  I trekked along to the Famine Memorial to catch the final tour of the day on the famine ship museum, the Jeanie Johnstone moored alongside, before leaving for the airport and home.
The memorial itself is as bleak and as stark as the event, if ever sculpture can convey history then that happens here. The height and thinness of the figures exaggerated in a way that conveys that hollowness of stomach and absent flesh, the defeated posture and the legs struggling to support the bodies, hands clutching at so little, barely holding onto life.

The Jeanie Johnston is a faithful reconstruction of a famine ship designed and built as a joint project by the Republic and Northern Ireland.

This time round a fully sea-worthy triple-masted tall ship with 21st century safety features, which then recreated the trans-Atlantic famine voyage with young adults from both communities as trainees. The hope is that the ship will be sailing again when the Tall Ships race leaves Dublin in 2012.
And yes, I was the muggins who asked the very informative guide how it got out under the bridges...the Beckett Bridge raises accordingly apparently.

Below decks a waxworks museum recreating some of the stories of those who sailed on this amazing ship... amazing because it is one of the few that sustained no loss of life on the trans-Atlantic voyages, thanks to a compassionate and caring captain and the very unusual presence of a competent ship's doctor.
Conditions below decks still cramped and uncomfortable and it's only as you sit down there that you wonder quite how they coped with this for the two months of the voyage, and with meagre rations and only the hopes and dreams to sustain them, but all tempered with the uncertainties that lay ahead.


Playing in the background a keening lament on the fiddle, the ships renowned for their music, singing and sometimes dancing to help keep the spirits up.
This was an incredibly thought -provoking end to my visit, and as I strolled back across the Beckett Bridge to my hotel I stopped and looked back for a moment at the city I'd done in a day...

and was just happily reflecting on what a wonderful visit this had been and how grateful I was to the Irish Tourist Board for taking such grand care of me when suddenly a sick feeling washed over me...hadn't I just spent all my euros and how was I going to get to the airport?
Never has a passenger watched the meter in a taxi quite so worryingly clutching her last happily discovered 20 euro note.
17.50 euros phew, just enough left to buy the Tinker a little gift.
Some Grow-Your-Own Shamrock.

Dublin & James Joyce

My hotel was down on Sir John Rogerson's Quay, so walking to and from there took me right through Bloom walking territory and I took in quite a few of the streets, Lombard Street East, Lime Street, Hanover Street East but it was Eccles Street I really wanted to see, even given that No7  is long gone.

Hopefully this gives you the general gist

The Writer's Museum just along the way in Parnell Square was well worth the visit if only to lay eyes on one of 'these'

and capture in my mind's eye that unique shade of blue-green for fabric purposes, it's all begging for something to be made. A first edition of Ulysses, but of course plenty more to see here as well on other famous Irish writers, why hadn't I realised that Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was Irish,  and an intriguing group painting of them all... imagine finding all these in the same room.

Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, Behan et al.
The lunch was good and my feet said thank you for the rest.
Next just a short walk to pay homage to the Eccles Street front door, as previously mentioned, now the property of M&S but on display at the James Joyce Centre.

Time also to take in the Joyce exhibition and more of my favoured mock-ups of original settings, and all very accessible, no roped off areas.


I find the whole idea of death masks both macabre but also quite intriguing, a sort of purge for my inquisitive nature. Being able to look on that face as it really was all these years later stirs up strange emotions and so I gazed for quite some time at James Joyce.

As I've said before this week, strange and ongoing things are still happening in my mind with regard to that reading of Ulysses. Not only do I want to read around it and dip into it again, but I now realise it wasn't just a box to be ticked, a book that had to be read. It's infiltrated at a much deeper level than I would have thought possible, all much enhanced by a walk around Dublin of course.
But time is moving swiftly on and I've now eaten into the three hours that I had been advised to allow for the trip out to Sandymount and the Martello Tower, so I opted instead to stick with Dublin city, because with a fair wind and sail I could get on the last tour of the day around the famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston, moored on Custom House Quay alongside Beckett Bridge, and near the hotel and my luggage.
Yes we're off to sea me hearties.

Dublin's streets broad and narrow...

Very many moons ago, before I had even started my nurse training in fact, I had a rather sophisticated and learned boyfriend who bought me a copy of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and impressed upon me that if I didn't get along with this book I wasn't going to get along with him.
I made a half-hearted attempt sensing that this was already going nowhere, read Dorian Gray and The Ballad of Reading Gaol and that was about it. I was unceremoniously dumped, which was all to the good because Bookhound was out there waiting a few years down the line, but I have had a bit of a soft spot for the plight of poor old Oscar and his terrible demise ever since.
That argument with the wallpaper as he died in semi-poverty in Paris, and in what can only have been the most excruciating agony from meningitis and the mastoid abcess which reputedly did unspeakable things in the minutes after his death in 1900.
I've visited Oscar Wilde's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery so I took in his house and memorial whilst in Dublin, doubtless happier times for Oscar when he lived at 1 Merrion Square.

And his memorial directly opposite finds him sprawled and with a rather wry, sardonic look to his face as he looks across to his old abode.

By now I'm too late and miles away from the start of the guided walking tour of Joycean sites suggested by my hosts at Discover Ireland, so I revert to Plan B, the dovegreyreader tour, whilst my feet are giving me a strong message that it's time to test out the free pass on the Tourist Bus.
I'm heading to The Writer's Museum in Parnell Square, it's quite a trek and I'm already carrying seven volumes of Joyce Studies, but on the way to the bus stop I can't pass the National Gallery of Ireland without nipping into the shop and perusing the cards, which would at least give me an idea of what I'm missing by not going in.
If there's one painting of many I would like to have found it is this one, The Doll's School by Walter Osborne.

I'm always reminded of this Marty Feldman sketch when I see a tourist bus (phrases from this have entered our family vernacular...on your left the Houses of Parliament ...everyone back on the bus) so I hopped on and watched  and listened incredulously as the female bus driver multi-tasked, negotiating a double decker bus around Dublin's Saturday morning traffic whilst giving a highly informative and amusing talk about the sights we were passing. I'm considerably wiser about Georgian architecture... the little windows at the top to give an appearance of height, the one and only front door in the city made into a double one because Royalty were expected to visit and could only walk through double doors, though in the end they failed to turn up.
But I was missing the streets so I hopped off again at St Stephen's Green and walked along Grafton Street; pure pleasure to watch the street entertainers and The Bird Man, one of the best living statues I have seen, not a flinch and with real pigeons hopping all over him.

Then over O'Connell Bridge and up O'Connell Street towards Parnell Square past The Spire to the James Joyce statue.
The Spire, the most extraordinary 120 metre high stainless steel, needle-like structure that almost seems to be touching the clouds, making for the most uninteresting picture with my little camera that does nothing to convey its impressiveness.

The James Joyce statue was 'occupied' when I got there and I had to agree to take a picture of the 'occupants' first, a pair of very merry and slightly wobbly Dubliners...

Before asking very nicely if I could then take a picture of James on his own.

I have a feeling James Joyce would have loved this moment, and of course I'm not far from Eccles Street and also the Writer's Museum which thankfully had a cafe and and a lunch stop.
Writing this now I'm beginning to feel this is starting to resemble my own version of Poldy's progress around Dublin, which says a great deal about how much there is of interest to see whilst also realising how far James Joyce made Leopold Bloom walk. I was only there for a total of thirty hours, and soaking in the bath or asleep for some of that, but I still have so much to tell you, we have the afternoon to do yet.

W.B.Yeats @ the National Library of Ireland

It was but a hop and skip along the Dublin streets from Trinity College to the National Library of Ireland in Kildare Street, I'm ahead of the crowds and had ear-marked the W.B.Yeats exhibition as another 'must visit' venue.
But Yeats and I have a pathetically poor track record after that pig's ear of an exam question which left me barely on speaking terms with him all those years ago, my fault entirely. I'd ignored him all through the Modern Literature course thanks to time limitations and a rather over-balanced leaning towards Hughes, Larkin and Plath, and so when I turned the paper over and saw they'd thrown in a Yeats for the unseen analysis, well more fool me for even attempting it.
It was very unseen, I'd never laid eyes on it before and I'll bet you all know that sinking feeling when you reach the point of no return... insufficient time to choose another question so you plough on clueless and inventing wildly through the morasse and end up feeling sorry for the examiner who's going to have to wade through this treacley mess of disordered thought to mark it.
So I walked into this grand and imposing building determined to make friends with W.B.Yeats, and it was about the easiest friendship I've ever made, because as I walked into that little room ahead of me, with its comfortable bench seating around the edge, beautifully evocative and changing screen images around the walls, the words and a recording of the poem resonating around, this is what gently assailed my ears...

read by Kathleen Watkins,

'... I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

How could anyone not love those words in that order and W.B.Yeats instantly and not a moment before time, enters the portals of the dovegreyreader personal poetic greats.
Being completely inquisitive about inner lives and the day to day-ness of writers, I love exhibitions like this, with collages

and library shelf mock-ups

and spectacles and locks of hair

and original manuscripts which transport me to that 'looking over the shoulder' position which feels so intimate, as if I'm watching someone write...

I was here much longer than I had intended but this wasn't a race around the city, I wanted time to soak it all up, so I sat down again in the little room and listened to all the available poems, allowing them to wash over me.
It will be hard to forget hearing W.B.Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree on this my first trip to Dublin. An elderly, slightly shaky yet venerable voice and a life I now knew a great deal more about, if you missed it when I linked the other day, you too can sit there and enjoy the moment with me.

If a library exhibition is so good then the next best thing has to be the library shop and the library's own series of Joyce studies on *special offer*, twenty-one slim volumes for the knock-down bargain price of 15 euros. Don't even ask me about the pain of indecision I suffered as I realised that I couldn't possibly carry all these around Dublin for the rest of the day, and so anguished over seven to be going on with.

One thing that has become very evident since Team Ulysses is that this book is staying with me. I think about little bits of it often, moments flit into my mind out of nowhere making me keen to read much more background and, I knew it would happen, even dip into a little of the academia that I have avoided. So I chose my seven and off to my next stop, a brief homage to Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde and onwards to the Writer's Museum.
Out in the lobby I'm distracted a while longer by a display of letters in response to a request sent by the library down the years to well-known figures asking for the name of their favourite poem.
William Trevor :: The Lady of Shallot, Seamus Heaney :: Cuculain Comforted,  Graham Norton in an eloquent and beautifully written letter :: Epic by Patrick Kavanagh.
So which would you chose?

Dublin Saturday

A hearty hotel breakfast, unlike anything I would ever manage at home, and I'm fuelled and off on my Dublin Saturday.
My guides from the Irish Tourist Board had very kindly put together some suggestions for me and will do the same for you if ever you find yourself in Dublin, but I kept wandering off-piste, diverted by so much to see in so little time.
I set off along the banks of the River Liffey in perfect walking weather, bright but chilly so no overheating today, heading for Trinity College and the Book of Kells, firstly because it's there and it's on my list of things that have to be seen just because, and secondly for all I'd heard about it, I actually knew very little.
The first thing any patchworker would notice walking into the gates of Trinity College is the wooden floor...

which also reminded me of the basalt of the Giant's Causeway and which is perhaps the intention.

Then, as always with these college entrance ways that belie the space beyond, your breath is slightly taken away with the size of that space and the architecture.

The Book of Kells the four gospels in Latin, exquisitely decorated by the monks of Iona sometime in the 9th century and lucky to have survived not only the Viking raids on the island which left sixty-eight monks dead, but also the scourge of Cromwell. The book was sent to Dublin for safe-keeping in 1653 and to Trinity College in 1661 and there it has stayed.


The exhibition itself a sort of progress towards a darkened inner sanctum where the book rests, and along the way a series of large illuminated slides which reveal the intricacies barely visible to the naked eye when you finally see it, all making it even more of a marvel.
It's the little facts I love...the 185 calf skins needed to make the vellum pages, the swan's quills and marten fur brushes, the minerals for the pigments, azurite, malachite, orpiment...
Orpiment?
What's that?
A rare arsenic based mineral I discover that yields the yellow pigment, highly unstable and liable to deteriorate into a powder, so where did they source that and how?
And how on earth could they see to create such fine detail?
If I'd bought the guide book I'd know these things but suffice unto the day, I have seen The Book of Kells and can now rest easy.
On the day of my visit the book open at Luke 4:1 The Temptation of Christ... Jesus autem plenas spiritum sancto and the text open at John 7: 31-44
The exhibition leads on into the Long Room of Trinity College Library, surely among the most magnificent libraries in the world with its 65 metre long gallery and 200,000 books.


Each alcove containing a pair of very enticing wooden ladders fixed to a sort of sliding rail system, a booklover's playground if ever I saw one.
A form of reverential space of awesome proportions.
And I've now seen the oldest know specimen of an Irish harp nestling in there too, made of oak and willow, thought to be fifteenth century; think Guiness and you'll know the shape of it.
As I left the crowds were starting to pour in and I realised I had been fortunate to get a glimpse of all this without any jostling, so keeping myself ahead of the game it was off to the National Library in Kildare Street to see the W.B.Yeats exhibition.

Dublin Culture Night 2010

I'm sorry to have to admit that I was a bit of a lightweight when it came to tackling last Friday's Dublin Culture Night head on when I'm sure the rest of you would have kept going until the small hours and managed the late night supper at Harry's Cafe and still been up with the lark on Saturday.
I'd done the PEN event in London the night before and was staying at the Penn Club (no connection) in Bloomsbury and right opposite my old nurse's home in Bedford Place.
For those that don't know of it, The Penn Club an ideal place to book a comfortable, clean and warm budget room and breakfast for overnight London stays. Except I hadn't slept a wink after the excitement of the day and a fear of oversleeping for my early flight, eventually deciding at 5am it made more sense to skip the breakfast and be awake and checked in at the airport than lying awake in Bloomsbury.
I managed to get from Bloomsbury, and how eerily familiar was it to walk those dark wet and deserted London streets to the tube at 6am, thence to the airport, then to Dublin to hotel and to lunch at The Winding Stair by 1pm and a meeting with Joseph O'Connor.
Time had been set aside for me to talk with Joseph about his new novel Ghost Light and all those other very inquisitive things that 'dovegreyreader asks...' likes to know, more of which soon. I did have to own up shamefacedly that I was new to his novels; honestly authors must hate it when people interviewing them say that but supposing he'd asked me what I thought of Redemption Falls or Inishowen, then the cat would have been out of the proverbial. Anyway Joseph was utterly charming and lovely and of course I now want to read everything, plus he signed my almost finished copy of Star of the Sea.
After lunch, and feeling the onset of creeping withdrawal symptoms connected to no sighting of a bookshop, I was more than happy to find one attached to the restaurant and an extremely good one it is too, and therein was my promised treat, a copy of the poetry of W.B.Yeats.
I now feel a whole Yeats post coming on having also been to the exhibition at the National Library of Ireland in Kildare Street while I was in the city, and which proved to be a complete joy thanks in large part to this. Click the top of the arrow and you can sit in that little room too and hear Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree and also take in the rest of the exhibition.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, that's for Saturday, it's still Friday.
Culture Night is becoming a national and now an annual late-September event across Ireland, and one which has grown from small beginnings, all in an effort to reclaim the Temple Bar area of Dublin from the copious hen and stag nights it had become renowned for, and all thanks to Mr O'Leary's cheap-as-chips flights into the city. Fortunately it's now cheaper than chips to go to Riga and Barcelona so the per-nuptial hens and stags have clucked and galloped in that direction, leaving Temple Bar to up its cultural game and turn around the negative publicity, which it has done with great and ever-increasing success.
I was introduced to the Minister for Arts & Culture who happened to pass by and looked set to have a grand time (as we now say) and I was just wallowing in the voices. I could listen to Dubliners talking all day, it really is an exquisite and beautifully expressive accent.
Everyone was busy getting ready for a fantastic night of free events, readings, exhibitions, music, street entertainers, singing and dancing so it was wonderful to stroll around amongst it all.

Something unusual around every corner

and then you look upwards, in a city you don't know and spot even more unusual sights.

So I'm afraid that was me sleep-walking back to the hotel by 8pm, about twenty minutes walk along the banks of the River Liffey when you're awake, I have no idea how long it took me whilst asleep on my feet, but most unusually a good night's sleep followed, a real rarity for me away from home, and all ready for the On Your Marks...Get Set... Dublin day I had planned for us on Saturday.

Dublin ...'twas grand.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is any old piano,

or that this is any old letterbox upon which I have laid my hand in homage...

but that's James Joyce's piano, and none other than the number 7 Eccles Street front door.
No longer to be found in Eccles Street and actually this is no ordinary front door either...  this is an M&S front door, because they now own it, but I found it eventually and not in the Food Hall.
So I've done the whole tourist thing and I'm sorry for making you walk quite so far because I'm not sure where I've left my feet either, they don't seem to belong to me today, though I do have to sing the praises of my new Mukluk FitFlop boots. Wherever they redistribute the weight around the soles of my feet, it's in the right places, like walking round with footduvets on, all making Dublin painless and magnificent.
Even the oft-maligned Ryanair was fine, nice fleet of smart planes that looked a lot more substantial than the OtherCheap flights I've done in airfix models with wobbly wings.
The flight home was delayed yesterday evening which had me in a bit of a panic about running out of book as I was nearing the end of Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, and in trying to save enough to have to read on the plane I idled away some airport time trying to spend the very last bit of Euro coinage.
I can't tell you what on yet because it's a little gift for the Tinker and he'll read this before I see him.
I had foolishly pronounced some time ago that the next person to go to Euroland had to take the fifty euros of loose change collected from various trips previous, not realising it would be me or how much it weighed, and then for some reason I became quietly obssessed about not bringing any coins back with me.
I can now quickly apologise to the man in the Winding Stair bookshop where I bought the nice edition of Yeats's poetry and who is unlikely to run out of change for the forseeable future, the man on the till at the Book of Kells exhibition at Trinity College likewise, the taxi driver who got me to the lunch on time and the ticket seller  at the Famine Ship Museum who helped me to engineer a complex mental arithmetical double exchange of coins and notes at 4pm that left me with the lesser note and her with even more coins.

And I saw and did a whole lot more besides, Cultural Night, the National Photographic Archive exhibition 'Power & Privilege, The Big House in Ireland 1858-1922', the W.B. Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland (extraordinarily powerful)  the James Joyce Centre, The Writer's Museum, Grafton Street, O'Connell Street, all of which I shall present for your delectation through this week.
And I even went and found this just so I could say Team Ulysses had been there.

My very sincere thanks to the Irish Tourist Board for their invitation and all the care and effort they had put into the trip, and yes I did get to sit and talk one-to-one with Joseph O'Connor in The Winding Stair restaurant and yes, the voice recorder was switched on, and yes he is wonderful to talk to, much more about that soon too.
Not forgetting the PEN event either, much to tell you about Thursday including afternoon tea with two authors, one of whom is on this year's Booker short list and the other who was there a few years ago, and all the lovely people I met that evening. Thank you to those of you who came, I could see you all smiling at me in the audience, it was lovely.
Can all this really be happening to me?
But it's back to reality and I quite thought I'd be getting a year older in Dublin airport because it's that day with the candles again, which seems to be coming around at warp-speed, but Bookhound trilled 'the song' halfway back down the M5, as midnight chimed.
Thank you for cards... you have very amazing memories. The Kayaker rang 'very early' this morning (we must be grateful even if half asleep which I was) and of course the Tinker rang too, but he knows that this is one of those days in the year when I miss my Mum the most, she loved birthdays, so this picture always seems to fit the day nicely.
I always like to think that gaze is fixed in my memory somewhere.

Dublin bound...

Hope you are all packed and ready to depart. I'm up at crack-of this morning after last night's PEN event (more of that soon) to get us to the airport on time.
I've only been to Ireland once before and that was with a gang of student nurse friends on a horse-drawn caravan holiday around Westport in County Mayo.
No, I don't know what I was thinking either, I'm not a lover of horses so it was a terrible ordeal that had me wishing myself back on night duty on the Infectious Diseases ward, but I blame Laura Ashley completely.
We'd all bought our long dresses for £6.30 from the shop in Sloane Street and nabbed those little short smocks that you wore over your loon pants (the jeans that with a fair wind behind the legs would have got you right across the Atlantic) and we were all desperate to get out of 1970's London and try all this out whilst gliding through real flowery meadows in the real countryside. It was a blessing that at least the horse had a brain and knew the way round and when to stop because none of us had the first clue. The horse also knew that its food was kept in a very horse-accessible box on the back of the wagon, so having scoffed a week's rations when we weren't looking on the first night, it had to live on slim pickings of grass for the rest of the week.
The countryside was indeed beautiful and I clearly remember the sight of Croagh Patrick with its pilgrim's path visible around every corner, but I also recall being consumed with worry that our starving nag would be skeletal by the time we got back to where we'd started and we'd be in awful trouble.
As for catching the thing to harness it up for the day's journey...
Anyway they let us out of the country, but I just have to think Ireland and, as well as caravans, in piles all the other imagery gathered hither and thither down the years; Dana singing All Kinds of Everything and lush green fields and poverty and misery and no potatoes, dissent and unrest and a general dissatisfaction with all things emanating from England, jolly good funerals and fantastic wakes, McGahern and Trevor, a bit of horse rustling, some Flatley River Dancing, shilelaghs, shamrocks, Guinness and the Liffey, Toibin and Sebastian Barry, to say nothing of all those recently acquired layers of Bloom and Molly and more funerals and fried kidneys.
Ridiculous muddle, it's time to sort it all out and see for myself and I'm very excited to get the chance to do so.
So I'm on my way to Dublin and the City of Literature events today and will hopefully be meeting and doing dovegreyreader asks... with Joseph O'Connor at lunchtime (RyanAir willing etc... please say a novena or whatever works best for you on my behalf) going to various events at Culture Night tonight and a day in an around the city tomorrow.
OK everyone, I have a flag on stick here, please don't lose sight of it.