Skip to main content

St Patrick's Day - a good day out (bleeding for art?)

Today's St Patrick's Day Parade went off very well. The new route seemed to work quite well. It was good that it didn't rain although it was very cold and my fingers were quite frozen until close to the end. As usual I paraded with the Tipperary County Association which is run by an (ex Labour now independent group) Councillor from Rubery. (Dave McGrath - see main person in photo)

Unusually the Tipperary Association has live music, three accordians and me on guitar/mouth organ. Most other associations have recorded music. We normally play a mixture of irish melodies plus the eternal Long Way to Tipperary (not an Irish song). To properly do that, of course, we have to hold back slightly so that there is a "Long way" until the Tipperary group.

Because this association has a relatively small banner in blue with the word Tipperary in large print on it the association tends to feature in much of the photographic publicity from each of the years. The main photo in this news item shows Tipperary in 2004.



I have played the guitar with this group in 2003, 2004 and 2005 although I first joined the group in 2002. In 2003 we had two other guitarists, but came to the current line up in 2003 which was a nice warm day and ended in Centenary Square.

At least I know what it means to "bleed for your art". It was so cold that I didn't notice I had caught my index finger on the strings (I was using a plectrum). After the end I noticed that I was bleeding slightly.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin