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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.

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