Two Thousand & Ten

Greetings culture vultures, a (very) belated Happy New Year! A combination of holidays, maladies and a prolonged bout of broadband ‘outage’ all conspired to temporarily banish me from the ether. Outage? Outrage more like. What was I thinking switching to Vodafone. They leave you on hold for hours, force you to listen to crap music – if I ever come across that guy who sings More Than Words I’m gonna thump him – and then, 2 weeks later, they wake you up at 9 O’CLOCK ON A SUNDAY MORNING to try and fix the damn thing. And it still didn’t work… AAAAARRRGGH… First chance I have I’m switching right back.

Meanwhile it’s nearly February two thousand and ten. None of this twenty ten business in my neck of the woods. If the French can say ‘mille neuf cent quatre vingt dix neuf’ for 1999, then we should be able to manage something that doesn’t sound like poor vision. But the good news is, despite the R word, there’s actually oodles of stuff going on. Temple Bar Tradfest kicks off tomorrow (27 Jan til Sun 31) with concerts at Project and the Button Factory, including the likes of Matt Molloy, Finbar Furey and new kids on the block Liadan; pub sessions featuring some pretty high profile performers, among them Eleanor Shanley, Kila, Sean Og Potts, Kevin Glackin and loads more; and a string of workshops, screenings, parades, ceilis, in fact all the ingredients for a good oul hooley. www.templebartrad.com