32A

I'm watching a great Irish film called 32A on RTE TWO. It's about a thirteen year old girl called Maeve who is in that awkward 'In-Between' stage where you're not a girl, but not a woman, you know? It's set in the Seventies and traces Maeve's journey through getting The First Bra, and falling for The Local Heartthrob, Brian (!) and learning to stick by your friends in the end. The soundtrack is great and the young cast are fantastic! It was a big hit at all the international film festivals around the world. Ailish McCarthy is one to watch!

Happy New Year!

Yes! Cyberspace! I haven't been on the Internet in so long because I've been in Co. Kerry with my cousins and my grandmother for the past few days. I went to a wedding, and I met a handsome boy from London named Jamie.... Turned out he's a distant cousin. It was a family wedding. (!) It could only happen to me!

Apparently today is the last day of the Noughties, 'the decade no one could pronounce'. I don't believe in New Year Resolutions. But I do have a List Of Things I Am Going To Try To Do And That I Won't Beat Up Myself About If I Don't Happen To Do Them. I haven't thought of a catchy name for it yet as you can see.

And on a topic completely unrelated, how cute is this bag?! I think it sends out a very important message.

Happy New Year everybody!

Web Wonders: BookArmy

Hello! I want to tell you about a great website for any readers out there! This is...BookArmy!

What is it?

BookArmy is a website dedicated solely to books! You can let people know what you’ve read recently, what you loved and what you hated, plus you can get in contact with your favourite author-types! How awesome is that?!

How does it work?
Basically, you enter the name of a book you love, and BookArmy will search thousands of recommendations to suggest what book you might like to read next. The most awesome thing about it, is that with every review written and every recommendation made, BookArmy becomes more intelligent - Cool, huh?!

Right now, BookArmy are running a kick-ass competition - they’re giving away a stack of of books to their most helpful and enthusiastic members, so if you love books and want to shout about your favourites, what are you waiting for?! Get writing girls!

Take a look at my personal page! My username is Trishelle. (They wouldn't let me change it after I transformed into my alter-ego EleanorLight.)

WOOHOO! Let’s get this discussion started! http://www.bookarmy.com/

Lodged by Robert Frost

My English teacher, Ms Cotter (my most favourite teacher ever!!) gave us this poem yesterday:

Lodged

The rain said to the wind,
'You push and I'll pelt'.
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt
And lay lodged, though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

Robert Frost

This is now one of my favourite poems.

Vanishing Ireland

Joe McCabe & Mick Lalor
Born 1919 & 1931

The Hurler & the Diviner

Abbeyleix, County Laois

Mick Lalor is anxious to set the record straight. His daughter is married to Joe McCabe's son. And Joe's father was Mick's schoolteacher in Clonad. And yes, okay, Joe's father did have a wee romance with Micky's mother. But that was a long time ago, before anyone was married. Above all, he and Joe are neighbours - and always have been.



It is clear that Joe and Mick regard the ongoing link between their two families as a happy coincidence. They are great pals. Joe swears Mick is 'one of the best water diviners in Ireland - bar none'. And Mick says Joe's record as a hurler speaks for itself. The two were taking afternoon tea and cream buns when we called in to the McCabe house in Ballyroan outside Abbeyleix on a wet spring afternoon.



The two men sit in opposing armchairs chuckling at the old times, at stories they've heard a hundred times before yet which still carry an essential lightness of being. There is the story of the kindly fool who accidentally donated the entrance fee for a vital hurling match to the parish priest. Or the scoundrel who had the monopoly on bicycle tyres and wireless batteries during the war. Or the hurler who kept all his money in a matchbox but accidentally lost the box while making haycocks 'so he had to unravel all his cocks with a pitchfork and start over again'. Then there was Jack Lyons, a massive lad who had to get a bypass. 'Doctor, a bypass is no good to me - I need a roundabout.' Sometimes it is hard to grasp why stories are funny. It's like trying to make sense of long gone currencies. And, as such, it is inevitable that older men look down in brief dismay that such wonderful memories can possibly lose their sheen over time.



But much of storytelling is about the way it is told and, eighty-seven years on, Joe McCabe's endearing tales are as hypnotic as they ever were. Joe is the first of his McCabe line for four generations to not become a teacher. 'I have sisters who were teachers. I have a daughter teaching - and a grandchild teaching too! But I was too thick for teaching!'



Instead, he evolved a passion for hurling. As a child, his native county still echoed with the roars of those who had carried Laois to victory in the 1915 All-Ireland Hurling Championship. The weather had been so wet that day the two teams played the second half in overcoats. One of his many colourful tales involves a midnight raid on a prosperous farm to pinch a lump of ash to make some new hurls. Luckily, even at the age of twelve, Joe could clearly run.



In the GAA's Jubilee Year of 1934, the fifteen-year-old Joe McCabe, clad in short trousers, played for the Laois Minors in a match that saw them become Leinster Champions. Next up was Tipperary in the All-Ireland final at Croke Park. What an astonishing prospect for any fifteen-year-old.



'None of us knew Dublin,' he says of the team's arrival in the city. 'We had nothing only our boots, tied together and thrown across our backs. And we carried our hurls in our hand. We had no cases, no pyjamas or anything at all. We walked along the quays and then up to Barry's Hotel. We went to the pictures that night. The Plaza! I remember it was four old pence. We came out of it after and there was a chipper. We never had chips before but by jaysuz we got a tray of them and tucked in. I only had half a crown when I came to Dublin to play in an All-Ireland final. That's all I had and there were lads who hadn't even that! We ate the chips and went back to the hotel and we went to bed. We got up the next morning and went to mass and went on to Croke Park.'



Laois lost by a point after a second half that lasted forty-five minutes and Tipperary brought on nine substitutes. With teacher blood thick in his veins, Joe swears he took the train home straight after the match so that he could finish off his homework for the Christian Brothers in Portlaoise by the Monday morning. 'We had a great big clock on the wall. I remember it was twenty-five to nine when I got home for dinner. My mother said, 'You didn't win today?' - the hurling was on the radio or something - I said, 'No.' My father gave me a note for the Brothers in the morning.'



Joe is the only player to have been on the Laois minor team for five years in a row - 1933 to 1937. He continued to hurl until 1960 and says he got a welt from a hurl every time he went out. 'We didn't mind welts. We were working hard. That time we'd walk twenty mile and we'd work and walk home. We got so hardened. People were much tougher. There was nothing to eat only bread and butter and the bacon that hung above you. We'd eat anything, carrots or turnips or cabbage.'



After he left school, Joe's father paid a welder to employ his son as an apprentice. Joe went without pay for the next three months - 'to see was I any good!' He got a salary of five shillings a week afterwards and 'got up to fifteen shillings by the time I finished!' His career path was set. 'I welded all my life - the whole life I'm welding.' He claims to have invented a crank shaft that cannot be broken - not even by a steam engine - but vows that he will take his secret recipe to the grave. In the end, he had a business of his own outside Abbeyleix, lately sold to make way for a residential estate.



Mick is a quieter man, one of six children born into a farming family from Portlaoise. At seventy-six, he has survived a bypass, a hernia and the complete loss of sight in his right eye. His gift for water-divining was revealed in his boyhood when his teacher - Joe's father - asked everyone to give it a try. Mick was the solitary success, although his anxious father insisted someone was 'codding' him. After school, he tried it again while checking on the cattle one evening and sure enough the magic sticks crackled over a source of water. 'I don't know is it a gift or not. It just works and that's all. I've seen hundreds of people who say they can do it but I've only met two or three who actually can.' He has four daughters and two sons but says none of them can divine. 'It just doesn't work that way.' When Mick married, he gave up farming and bought a machine for well-drilling. 'Every new house built around the country has to get water - and Mick is the man to find it,' asserts Joe.

This is the story of my grandfather, Joe McCabe, and his best friend Mick Lawlor. They were interviewed for a book called Vanishing Ireland: Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World by Turtle Bunbury. Our family call Joe 'Fafa' and have done so for the past twenty years. Fafa is the man sitting. This is the full interview from the book.

Followers? Followers!

Wow. I actually have FOLLOWERS? THREE? Whoa! And I don't know any of them in real life! Well, you know what I mean.

Thank you SO MUCH guys!!!!

This picture is from a fabulous book called Seriously Sassy by Maggi Gibson. This is a link:

http://www.seriouslysassy.co.uk/

Web Site Story

I am really excited about the Lola Love T-shirt.

This is AWESOME!!!! It combines two of my favourite things: the Internet and West Side Story!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Tell me what you think!

Oh My Stars!!

I have to tell you about this!!!

WOW!!!!!!!

I am a HUGE fan of Lola Love, so this is a dream come true! My ultimate goal is to have hair like her's someday. And you see what it says on the front? 'I am so blogging this!' This was made for me!

AND you get a free Lola Love book with it too! Golly Gosh!

I love New Moon!!

All the schools in Ireland are going on strike tomorrow, so no school!! I'm really excited.

I saw New Moon on Friday evening. Whoa.

OK. Let's be more specific.

The actors are much, much better this time around. Kirsten Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are Bella, Edward and Jacob. Not a version of Bella, Edward and Jacob. Actually Bella, Edward and Jacob. Amazing.

The fights are brilliantly choreographed. The wolves are actually scary. They don't look fake. Of course, you know they are fake, but you forget.

It's full of romance, action, and it's hilarious! There's lots of funny bits, courtesy of Messrs Jacob Black and Charlie Swan. Hee hee!

I applaud Chris Weitz! I loved the editing, and how the shots seemed to flow together easily, for example the October November December January bit and the shots of Bella and Jacob in Jacob's garage.

I am definitely getting it on DVD! Roll on Eclipse!!

Interesting Experiences Part Do

Let's continue.

NUMBER THREE!!!

For my birthday I decided I wanted to go to Tramore with my family. So we brought Theo, our Jack Russel aswell. The waves were huge. It was terrifying. They were like the life-threatening ones you see in Hawaii.

So we got chips from Dooly's and sat on a wall happily eating them. We were watching a man play with his dog, throwing a plastic bottle. They were having great fun and it was lovely to
watch.

The man was still grinning at us when the wave hit him.

He didn't see it at all.

His head bobbed out of the water a few times. Then nothing.

We sprang up, as did ten other people who were there. Someone got the nearest lifebuoy, but the rope attached was tangled up and people were wasting time untangling it.

Then, without thinking, I started running.

I ran halfway down the promenade to get another lifebuoy. But I'm not a fast runner. It was only when I stopped at the lifebuoy that I realised how tired I was. I started running again, but I was slower. Then a girl ran up to me. She held out her arms and I gave her the lifebuoy, then she started running. I ran back too.

Four men balanced on the wall, risking their lives to get the man in the water to grab the lifebuoy. My mother was screaming 'Someone hold those men! They're going to fall!' My dad was talking to 999.

The man was pulled out of the water. He was awake and conscious. Then the Gardai came and asked a lot of questions. An ambulance arrived eventually and took the man away. We left then, not knowing whether the man was going to be OK.

NUMBER FOUR!!!

What shall I call you, my readers? My darlings? Chicas? Ladies? Readers?

Mum's on the warpath! Gotta go!

Interesting Experiences Part Aon

OK. I have three important things to tell you about:

Wait, make that four.

NUMBER ONE!!!!

Thursday night.

There is a publication in Kilkenny called the Rhyme Rag that is published every year, which contains poems by teenagers in Kilkenny. I entered it for the first time this year, and I got a poem in it!

Thursday was the launch night of Issue Five and I wore my best outfit. I was feeling excited and I was kicking ass!! And the editor, Adam Wyeth, mentioned me and my poem in his speech!!!!!!

Then we had to read out our poems and I was first! And I KICKED ASS!!!!!

That was one of the best nights of my life.

NUMBER TWO!!!!

Today.

I am fourteen years old today. I'm already starting to think of my thirteen year old self as way younger than me. God, I'm such a hyprocrite.

I got an iPod nano, a New Moon t-shirt, a Saw Doctors album, Night Of The Museum 2 on DVD, Little Big Planet of PS3, and other stuff. Sorry for the lack of info.

I think I'll have to do NUMBERS THREE and FOUR tomorrow, I have to go.

Fourteen

Sorry about the last post. I was trying to type this and... never mind.

So I'm fourteen years old tomorrow. It's weird. Fourteen seems so old. I can barely imagine myself fifteen. And that's in a year's time now. Strange, how time passes.

I have nothing organised to do for tomorrow. If I'm not careful it'll be like any other Saturday. Ugh. I love my Saturdays but I'm going to be fourteen for God's sake. I want the day to be special.

I might go to Tramore.

How do you solve a problem like a birthday?

I don't know what I'm going to do for my birthday. I would like to get a McDonalds takeaway with my friends and then go to the Castle Park and listen to music and dance and chat and play games. That would be lovely, but my birthday is in NOVEMBER.

I might go see New Moon, but that's out a week later. I'd love to do something with my friends from Barnstorm. That would be so cool. I love those guys.

Salutations!

Salutations!

This is my second blog. My first one really didn't work out great so I'm going with this one.
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