Grandmother's Potatoes

 We recently had some crazy fits with local buses, something went wrong with the display control systems on Limerick and Clare bus Eireann buses. 

The funniest and most commented was the 343 becoming the 4343, people talked about the Twilight Zone. 

I was going through a tough time with the commute and so on and wasn't so amused, and commented that the newly returning students from further afield would be very confused. 

Then I caught an even funnier bus destination and I don't know if it was deliberate but the driver was falling about when I got photos. A 305/A local cross-town service terminated on Patrick Street, reading 'Sligo via Dublin', my friend commented that this was a very confused bus among all the confused buses with incorrect number, more so that he was reading '304A' and he definitely wasn't in the right place to be that either.

The most famous bus destination sign in Limerick is 'Grandmother's Potatoes', a local joke which baffles visitors. I remember having a terrible day and cheering up when I saw it. It reminds us of the lighter side of life.

In 2014, Limerick was City of Culture, and a theatre troupe came to town and did a sketch called 'Grandmother's Breakfast', a local bus, full of potatoes, 4 tons, I think, was part of the sketch, and bus drivers never forget it, and remind us of it occasionally.

Limerick is a special and quirky place, we have Grandmother's Potatoes. We also have people having romances with postboxes, and this features heavily in some of my work. We recently looked at expanding on this, with a murder mystery and a comedy.

The murder mystery sees Rogue Property Tycoon Michael G. Tierney, brutally murdered, with the postbox as the only witness, and the comedy is 'The Observations of a Limerick Postbox' where the postbox sees everything, from the Ornamental Gardai scrolling their phones to Stuart with his egg fried rice - sorry Stu, couldn't resist, and the romantic liaisons the postbox has, and of course the confidential information it eats as well as various other objects that people rudely place in its mouth. 

It's a misty Saturday morning in Limerick, the first mist of the season, and I'm enjoying rare peace and quiet and rest for once. Beautiful. Christmas films, haha. 

Music

 I was playing the piano at Limerick Colbert. 

There's a piano there, and like most pianos in stations, it advertisers a piano sale and repair outlet, but it's out of tune. I promise I didn't try my ukulele tuner on it. I hate the uke tuner, I tune every play and yet somehow uke 2 is so out of tune it's flatlining each time on two strings.

Cord changes, cord changes, hard on my injured hand. 

I was playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano, and then I moved on to the LCETB anthem 'God bless us everyone' Alan Menken not the other one. It's because I had it on headphone and really wanted to play it, and so I did. I love music so much.

Yeah, music is life, I painstakingly took up music again after so much physical and mental anguish that I lost the physical and intellectual ability. 

As I sit and write, I'm listening to 'Snows of New York', my life is a sound track, and this one is a sad memory, about the Boss Man who died. The leader of the White Hats fell on the battlefield. 

Someone really helped me with that recently. They told me he chose to make the sacrifices he made, just as I chose to reach out and prevent two suicides, and he and I in humanity, did the same thing. It helped. 

The song following on is 'A place in the choir' best sung by the comedic and lovely Celtic Thunder. It reminds me of my days up at St Patrick's Road in Limerick, a grim time but with highlights. 

So what is being a student like now? I don't know, not deeply inspiring, but okay. I'm sitting in the smelliest library in the world to write this. It smells like someone tracked dog poo in.