I haven't got any high tech equipment with me so it's filmed on my phone, just out of shot is my little thumb piano. I'm growing to love that thumb piano, I tried replacing it with a shinier, fancier model but I didn't like any in the shop so I guess we're stuck with each other for now. I stayed there for a long while singing and I only got interrupted once by a police man who I was sure was gonna kick me out but instead asked if I was ok and wanted to know what my instrument was. Lovely! The song's called The Selfish Sister and I've written out the lyrics at the end of this post. 

To the right is what Mosteiro dos Jeronimos looks like during the day although this was a rare quiet moment, there's usually hundreds of people queueing outside!

You might know from my previous blog posts (or if you follow me on twitter, Facebook, instagram…etc.) that I’m currently composing two song cycles; The West pier Song Cycle and The Telepathic Two Song Cycle. The west pier one accompanies a walk along the west pier in Dun Laoghaire (well I’d call it Monkstown but I think on google maps they call it Dun Laoghaire and who am I to argue with our google overlord!) and the Telepathic Two one follows the story of the telepathic mother and son taking a trip on the DART. Well I’ve decided to name the project FÓD.

FÓD is an Irish word that means sod, layer of soil or a strip of grass along a road. Depending on it's context it can mean a place or a spot of land. I had a few reasons for choosing the name not least amongst them it’s a really satisfying sounding word! Everyone has words they love and words they irrationally hate. My favourites are ‘bloom’ and ‘béim’*.

There’s an old Irish tradition of taking a lit sod of turf, ‘fód móna’, from the hearth of your family home when you leave to light the fire in your new home. Obviously this tradition made much more sense in small rural villages where your family home would be a literal stone's throw from your new home! There's a few lovely Irish traditions to do with home building like the one where you'd invite all your neighbours over to dance in your new home to stamp down the earth to create a solid rammed earth floor. 
 

So to me the word fód is this beautiful symbol of leaving home, the road to your new home, new beginnings...it ties together so much of what I want this music to say. 

On a side note I think this tradition might be where the idea for those awful tacky souvenirs that they used to sell in the airport come from. You know the ones of tiny ceramic cottages with tiny pieces of turf in them. They definitely weren’t made in Ireland and that ‘turf’ never came from anyone’s family home! My FÓD will hopefully be a more genuine and heartfelt interpretation of the tradition!

I’m home from a two week trip to Japan and it was just incredible! I had strange and wonderful food like the most beautiful bento box that came gift wrapped (it tasted and looked perfect) or a sea urchin in a fish market where they cut it right open in front of me and handed it to me with a spoon (the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten!). I sat in natural hot springs in the mountains in the snow and fed crackers to Nara deer who bowed and tried to steal my bag. Now I’m home and I’ve hit the ground running, I’ve got gigs coming up, lots of rehearsals and a West Pier Song Cycle to compose but I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about some of my musical adventures in Japan.

I came across this song by Japanese band Uimiuma about a year ago and ever since I find myself craving it from time to time. Whenever I'm feeling pissed off it makes me feel better. The cocky guitar riff, the fresh-green-leaves-in-springtime vocals, the optimistic snare marching along on the verse...it all adds up to just under a minute and a half of mood enhancing, confidence boosting good times. The lyrics sound like maybe they're about someone being defiant while simultaneously nonchalant but I actually have no idea, which is a bit of a blessing because it means I can pretend she's singing about whatever will make me happiest at that very moment. 

,If you've seen my Show Me video you'll know that I love to make things from paper. I never know what term to use...paper art, paper craft, paper sculpture, quilling...it doesn't matter really. I call mine paper creatures!

I've found some beautiful paper pieces, mostly through instagram (which is a brilliant medium completely wasted on photos of cappuccinos and people in the gym) that I'd love to share with you. The first is Rainniuniu who calls herself a 'book artist' and that's all I know about her! 

​Her human figures are like a cross between clean *Japanese aesthetic and sacred aboriginal art. You get a glimpse of all the inner workings, or imagined inner workings, of her human leaves. 

If you thought my stories were short take a look at these! 

I picked up Lydia Davis's collection of short stories (some of them micro short!) entitled Can't and Won't from the library and I'm really enjoying it.

I'm always drawn to storytellers that use very short sentences, maybe because I tend to think in long run on sentences so the brevity seems exotic or maybe just because I have a twitter generation attention span.