Feile Na Bealtaine

The Feile Na Bealtaine translated into English as the May Festival. Many towns across Ireland have May festival and Dingle is  no different. Founded 10 years ago in Dingle 2017 was to be the biggest yet.

As a celebration of all things cultural there were concerts, parades, book launches and talk, games, poetry and walks.

Visit http://feilenabealtaine.ie/home/ for more details but if you are looking for something to do next May bank holiday we'd absolutely recommend choosing Dingle for the 2018 Feile Na Bealtaine.

Our favourites were Jess Kidd chatting about her debut novel Himself, Sebastian Barry talking about his Costa award winning novel Days Without End. We saw music from Marie Breatnach, Spats Colombo, Katie Kim, Abigail Joffe and Peter went to Mozart's Requiem.

And the weather was amazing.
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And eight came to dinner

We owed a number of people dinner. On our previous trips to Dingle we been welcomed into several people's houses for dinner, sometimes on more than one occasion. We definitely needed to repay the generosity and choose Saturday evening as the ideal time. Eight were us two, AM, R&S and T&M. And Jess Kidd, author of Himself a brilliant novel who was appearing at the festival and stayed over an extra night with us.

Because we were spending the day out and about we had to prepare the meal like a military operation and in fact the day before.

Beginning with smoked haddock and asparagus soup  - which was delicious if I say so myself. The asparagus came all the way from the other side of Ballyferriter.

Main course was a Mary Berry's Chicken & Dijon with a vegetarian dish from The Happy Pear.

Finished off with the classic rice pudding, which sadly whilst being scummy had stayed in the oven for a little too long.

A lovely evening was had by all, we think anyway.

A day for a skip

Note to self, if ever (and this is highly unlikely) I am buying another place to live always check the garage has been emptied before you sign the dal.

The excitement back in early September was dulled ever so slightly when we opened the garage door and found a lot of items that we did not ask for.

So we hemmed and hawed over taking it ourselves to the dump in the back of the rental car or hiring a van locally and doing it in one run. Or finding a man who'd take a 50euro note to deal with it all.

There was sun-chairs, washing machine, three front doors no less, acres of wood and a raft of other smaller items. After much deliberation and meetings the chair and company secretary decided a skip was in order.

The wonderful people at South West Kerry skips promised and delivered a skip on time and in

exchange of 350Euros.

And the team got going and clearing out the garage making sure we maximised the space and kept under the very clear notice "do not fill above the top"

And so two hours later we had an empty garage, well nearly empty and a full skip.

It didn't stay that full for long. The plumber the following day asked if he could take several items out of it for the local football club. Same the world over eh. There is always someone who will take what you don't want.