I love this photo, taken on the occasion of Pauline’s mum’s 70th birthday. It captures Sean’s attitude to life well.
December 5, 2011
Let’s party!
Posted by Brendano under Death, Ireland, Memories | Tags: love, party, Sean O'Brien |[46] Comments
[46] Comments
December 5, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Sean as ever, a man for the occasion, popping off like a champagne cork! Lovely picture too of Gran in the background. Cheers Sean!
December 5, 2011 at 12:27 pm
Cheers, PapaG.
December 15, 2011 at 6:05 am
Hello Bilby.
December 5, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Hello Brendano
Trust all is well with you and your family. What a beautiful, effervescent picture of Sean and the family.
December 5, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Hello Shermeen … it’s nice to see you. We’re doing fine, thanks … I hope you and your family are well.
December 15, 2011 at 6:24 am
Hello Shermeen. I hope that you are still trying to take over the world so that we can all be properly curried and welcomed into the bosom of the Baitul Futuh mosque in Morden, UK, the epicentre of True Islam.
Keep on trucking as they say.
Awaiting the Caliphate, may I simply say that I see you as a good woman and I am interested in your translation work.
December 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Hi Brendano, nice photographs. Apropos of loss and celebration of a life I was at Joe Slavko’s memorial “do” in England. http://ashkenazim.wordpress.com even a photo of Lough Ramor there! Xmas wishes, C.
December 7, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Thanks for this, C … shame about Joe Slavko.
December 8, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Hello Brendano and Xueta. Thank you Xueta for the information about the memorial service for Michael. I was not fond of the Joe Slavko blogs and never found them funny, but I was very fond of Michael through the comments he made. I liked the kindness and intellectual honesty he displayed. I was very sorry to hear of his untimely death. May he rest in peace.
December 9, 2011 at 10:41 am
Bore dda, cariad There is an archive of Joe/Michaels stuff and if you or anyone else wants it e-mail or contact me on my site or wherever. It is snowing here now Brrr.
December 9, 2011 at 4:54 pm
Diolch yn fawr iawn, Xueta.
Drizzling here, and I sound like a bloke. Always interesting how a chill can affect one’s vocal chords.
December 7, 2011 at 4:54 pm
WE all miss him and even though I never got to meet your son I miss him also.
December 7, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Thank you.
December 8, 2011 at 9:07 pm
It’s a lovely, warm photograph, Brendano.
Sean’s uncontainable excitement makes his grandmother look like a girl.
December 8, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Hello Cymbeline … thank you.
A few moments later:
December 9, 2011 at 4:50 pm
I must say that the party girl is a beautiful and well-groomed woman. Good bone structure. I love those drop earrings. Amber, I think.
December 9, 2011 at 6:27 pm
Thanks, Cymbeline … I’ll tell her when I see her. Will ask Pauline about the earrings.
December 9, 2011 at 7:14 pm
The party girl had insisted on removing icing sculptures of her and her dog from the cake, to keep, claiming they were too good to eat. Apparently she still has them.
Yes, amber earrings, and she has an amber necklace to match.
December 9, 2011 at 7:25 pm
December 8, 2011 at 9:40 pm
December 8, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Lovely, Cymbeline. Granny was eight or nine when that was recorded.
December 8, 2011 at 9:51 pm
The feeling of the song is ageless, and I hear it in the second photograph.
December 8, 2011 at 10:31 pm
Yep, that song seems to be a perfect complement to the 2nd picture, even though I don’t understand one word. Yet there is so much fun and jollity going on. . Cymbeline you seem to have the knack of recognising the ‘moment’ by tagging it with some other seemingly unrelated expression.
Brendano I know I will return to this specific post just to see Sean and his gran and to listen to that Charles Trenet song!
Marvelous.
December 8, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Thank you, PapaG.
Happy days.
December 9, 2011 at 7:23 pm
I’m glad you liked the Trenet song, Papaguinea. ‘Nationale 7′ and ‘Jardin Extraordinaire’ are two other Trenet songs I like. I particularly like ‘Nationale 7′. It is about the magical holiday road from Paris to the South of France :
December 9, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Whilst on the subject of partying and being jung in spirit, I was interested to read about a new film called ‘Method in the Madness’. It is all about the Freud-Jung split which involved a woman called Sabina Spielrein.
I thought that you might be interested in it, Brendano.
December 9, 2011 at 11:05 pm
‘When they were jung and easily freudened …’ – a line from Finnegans Wake.
Thanks, Cymbeline … that does sound like my kind of thing, and I shall look out for it. Could be really good.
December 14, 2011 at 9:29 pm
‘when we were jung and easily freudened’
Brilliant and funny line. I’ll remember it.
December 14, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Joyce met Jung to discuss Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who had mental health problems. Jung disapproved of Joyce’s writing … he thought it dredged up unconscious contents too readily, or something like that.
December 14, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I like what seems to be prudence on Jung’s part. Surely a sign of great wisdom in the context you have outlined.
December 13, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Thanks Cymbeline for ‘Nationale 7′ by Charles Trenet. He is perfectly charming, both singer and entertainer. I imagine both young and old adored him – we would say he was a national treasure. i was watching his face and lips in the film footage, and seeing how expressive he is in song, enunciating the words with such love and affection for the language. Every line he tosses out as if he were flinging ribbons from a basket carried on his arm! I am going to get a Trenet CD for my sister-on-law who speaks good French! I might get two – he paints such scenes of innocence and love of life. I really enjoyed the song, thanks!
December 14, 2011 at 10:50 pm
That may well be. I think I read about it in Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce. As I recall, Lucia was schizophrenic. She suffered badly after Samuel Beckett rebuffed her.
Incidentally, there was a good quote from Meister Eckhart in the Schelling book: ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.’
December 14, 2011 at 11:04 pm
I do not know much about Christian theology, but the Eckhart quote makes me think of Methodism ( there is a strong Methodist tradition in my family). The idea of being able to speak directly to God, with no need of the middle man.
December 14, 2011 at 11:07 pm
The ‘me and my Maker’ idea.
December 14, 2011 at 11:09 pm
It makes a lot of sense to me. The middlemen are usually in it for their own benefit.
The ‘one love’, to me, is an echo of Bob Marley, or vice versa.
December 14, 2011 at 11:16 pm
I think that it is very much about ‘one love’. I also think that Marley sang that idea well. But Marley must not become a middle man.
December 14, 2011 at 11:22 pm
No, certainly not. Just a musician. ‘I’m just a song and dance man’, Bob Dylan once said when some people were trying to make him into a saviour.
December 15, 2011 at 12:09 am
I do not have an abstract mystical nature. I cannot relate to God without Jesus.
December 15, 2011 at 12:48 am
Which is why He was given to us.
I don’t think that we can see eye-to-eye with God without Jesus.
December 15, 2011 at 1:15 am
Samuel Beckett messed up MY mind when I was seventeen, and he had long been dead, so I sympathize with Lucia. He must have been even worse when he was alive.
And Samuel Beckett does not even have the excuse of being Jewish.
December 15, 2011 at 1:21 am
Actually no, I see that Beckett died in 1989, so some ten years after I studied ‘Waiting for Godot’ at school.
Very bad choice for young minds. Criminal even.
December 15, 2011 at 10:35 am
Yes, I remember he died in late December 1989, around the time Ceausescu was killed. My mother died a couple of weeks later.
Pauline did Waiting for Godot at school too, and hated it too.
December 15, 2011 at 8:11 pm
I understood every word. I was given top top marks for explaining the pointlessness of life in linguistic and philosophical terms. I was an ace at explaining pratfalls and non-communication. I made it clear that I knew about the plant that grows beneath the gallows, fed on the ejaculation emitted when a man is noosed and murdered.
I received an A in English Literature at A-level. There were other writers on the syllabus too, of course, but I remember Beckett most of all.
Some years later, my sister met my English teacher in a shopping precinct somewhere. My sister mentioned that I had been affected by ‘Waiting for Godot’. The teacher laughed and said that she was surprised about that. She had thought that the class was bored.
December 15, 2011 at 8:24 pm
I am glad that my simple Christian instruction proved strong enough to counter and beat the ideas encountered in ‘Waiting for Godot’.
I do not wish that I hadn’t read the play.
December 14, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Absolutely perfect image of Trenet flinging ribbons from a basket, Papaguinea!
I hope your sister-in-law enjoys the gift.
December 15, 2011 at 12:17 am
(one also cannot help looking at his tiny bathing trunks).