We woke up into the new day. It’s cloudy but there seems to be no threat of rain. We have nowhere special to go and decide to have an easy day of it. Wash clothes, have breakfast and practice tunes.
Around 4:00 we drive into Ennistymon, we need to stop at the market and get a few supplies we forgot. We find an antique shop and James asks if they might have a box he can put the flute that Wayne gave him into. She rustles around in the back of the store and comes out with a nice wooden box that a presentation bottle of Midleton whiskey came in. Check that off the list! We wandered into a nice cheese shop that had a good looking loaf of bread and some sheep’s cheese, which is one of the few I can tolerate. We tried a few other doors but they were locked. It was 5:00 and the end of the work day.
Back to our temporary home, grab the instruments and off to The Roadside Tavern for dinner and tunes. I looked to my left and there stood the man himself, Billy Archibald. I was truly pleased to see him and he remembered us. We chatted for a few minutes. He told us he retired just before Covid struck. He’d been at The Roadside for nearly 29 and a half years. He was happy to be retired and enjoyed coming in to drum to the tunes.
The Roadside has been taken over by new ownership and now serves from an updated menu. It’s no longer just pub food fair. Our meals were delicious and players were beginning to come in so we left our dinner table upstairs and went downstairs to grab some spots. A couple from Philadelphia, PA were having dinner and the woman very kindly offered a bit of the bench seat she was sitting on to me. James chatted with them and found out that he was born in Ireland and they were here for a family reunion. She told me that they had been to visit Australia just before coming here and they were reverse jet lagged on top of adjusting to Ireland.
The session started around 8:00. It was led by Sonia on fiddle and Carla providing guitar and vocals. This wasn’t a Trad session, lots of contemporary songs by American writers like Gillian Welch and John Prine. It also didn’t seem to comport to the general “session” rule that if you don’t know a tune or song, you sit out and not feck it up. A nice enough man was sitting across from me and between James and Morgan. He thrashed his way through tunes and songs playing too many chords and missing the changes a good deal of the time. I politely sat out on his songs if I had nothing to add but was not accorded the same from him. Oh well, these things can happen. We begged off around 10:00 and Bridget was waiting outside the door for us when we stepped out of the door.
We came home, had a snack and proceeded to play for another couple of hours. So ends another day and I’ve reported all there is for now.
