The Friday View 04/02
Ellie writes….
We won’t harp on too much about the uniquely Irish cliché of the Grand Stretch, but passing the milestone of Lá Fhéile Bhríd this week has come as a great, heaving sigh of relief to many of us, myself included. Mornings are brighter, evenings are starting to lengthen, buds are budding, bulbs are bulbing and birds are setting their alarms for earlier and waking up with more to say.
I went for my St Brigid’s Day swim.
I tend to mark just about all milestones by getting into the sea, no matter the season, and haven’t been over a week out of the water this past six years. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It completely clears your mind of any and all coherent thought, replacing it with a kind of scream of disbelief: the pointy end of Zen’s “living in the moment.” Some people drink to forget: I swim to forget.
The only problem is that around now is when the water takes a turn for the colder. It may seem counter-intuitive that as the days lengthen the water gets colder, but it’s the delayed impact of all those long, dark nights. The sea is such a vast volume of water that it takes a while for the return of the sun to make an impact. The fabled Christmas swim is a doddle compared to a dip in late February.
Water this cold is actually heavier: it wraps itself around you with an almost gelatinous quality to it. Your limbs move more slowly and the surface is, when the weather is calm, mercury-like, with a polarised sheen. Swimming through chilled silver.
February will also bring Tripe + Drisheen’s first anniversary later in the month. This is both exciting and preposterous. I can’t quite believe it. A whole year.
Click on any of the T+D website tabs and you will now see an impressive (if I do say so meself) archive of work, from the investigative to the personal, from opinion to news.
Some of you wonderful readers have been with us since nearly the very beginning. Others have joined more recently. But one of the most genuinely heart-warming things about the blossoming of this small independent media project - growing pool of subscribers aside - is the sense of community it fosters. Not only the sense of community, but also the breath-taking pool of expertise and knowledge within that community.
It’s an ambition of mine to start hosting live events and think-ins on themes emerging from our work. If this is of interest to you, feel free to drop us a line. That sense of community is worth building on, that expertise worth tapping into.
Friends, family and founding subscribers aside, some of the proudest moments to date have been those when strangers have known about Tripe + Drisheen: recently my brother-in-law was having a chat over the fence with a neighbour and mentioned something about his sister-in-law having written an article on a certain topic. Not only did the neighbour know the article, but was a Tripe + Drisheen subscriber to boot! Happy days.
You will notice an increase in news articles coming your way in the coming weeks: with more subscriptions under our belt, we are able to dedicate more time and energy to Tripe + Drisheen.
For those of you who don’t like an email inbox inundation, I just want to remind you that if four to five articles per week feels like saturation point, you can control how much you receive via mail and how much you just visit the website to read. Contributing to digital burn-out is not on the T+D agenda!
We wrote a handy guide to tailoring your tripe by controlling which tabs are emailed to you here:
In other news:
Biodiversity grants available for Cork city community groups
Are you involved in one of Cork city’s admirable array of community groups fostering biodiversity or heritage? Cork City Council’s Heritage Grant Scheme could bring in €200 to €1,000 for work your group wants to do. And if you want to write a heritage-related book, there are grants available of up to €4,000 under the publication strand of the scheme. Applications close February 25. Get in there. And let us know if you’re successful and what you’re going to do with the grant!
Volunteer with Cork Nature Network
Cork Nature Network are looking for a volunteer communications manager who can commit to working more than three hours per week:
Out and About
🎬 Watch: See Academy Award longlisted short film A White Horse on the big screen this weekend
Kerry-born, Cork-based director Shaun O’Connor’s A White Horse is being screened in the Triskel Cinema this week, as a bonus treat in advance of feature screenings of Stephen Karam’s generational drama The Humans. A White Horse is an 11 minute drama set in the Ireland of the 1970s and is a moving and discomfiting glimpse into an element of our recent past. It was longlisted for an Academy Award in 2021.
Time, date, place: Friday 4 and Sunday 6 at the Triskel Arts Centre. Times and bookings here.
🖼 Exhibition: Art and Environment at Crawford College of Art and Design
Five recent Crawford BA graduates whose work is bound by the theme of environment are currently exhibiting in a group show called Ar Scáth A Chéile / In Each Other’s Shadow 2022.
This is the second year of the Ar Scáth A Chéile series, and this year’s exhibition presents works from five MTU Crawford College of Art & Design Fine Art BA graduates - Bríanna Ní Léanacháin, Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh, Peggoty Ransley, Sarah Browne and Rachel Guilfoyle.
In case the name seems familiar to readers, we were very lucky at Tripe + Drisheen to feature Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh’s writing as part of last year’s Our Cork 2040 series where he elegantly and thought-provokingly envisioned an alternative future for agriculture:
Time, date, place: Ar Scáth A Chéile ’22 is in the James Barry Exhibition Centre at CIT campus but is currently only viewable online. Organisers hope that the exhibition will now be able to go live for its last week. The show runs until February 25.
Live Talk: Stand By for a behind-the-scenes look at Opera House performers
Photographer and Cork Printmakers member Miriam Hurley will be talking with arts writer par excellence Cristín Leach at the Opera House next Tuesday about her body of work, taken in the Opera House. Serendipity! Standing By, Miriam’s exhibition, features a series of photoetching prints of a wide variety of performers in those white-knuckle moments before they take to the stage.
Time, date, place: Cork Opera House 18:15 - 20:00, February 8. Free but ticketed. Tickets here.
Photo of the week: “the hut” in its final resting place?
This week’s photo is a spoiler for our Long Read: JJ, himself the son of a bus driver, has spent the past few weeks researching the history and fate of the hut which once stood in the shadow of Father Mathew on the top of Pana. Used first by firemen and then by tram and bus drivers, the structure seems to still hold a place in the heart of Corkonians.
On his wanders, JJ popped his head into the council yard in Fitzgerald’s Park, where the hut, nearly 100 years, lies quietly crumbling.
Of course, JJ is also the son of a bus driver:
The Long Read this week:
We’ve pretty much told you about it now, haven’t we? Lovely reminiscences and a detailed history of the hut here: