Happy St Patrick's Day

Happy St Patrick's day to you. If you're Irish that is.

I find it kind of annoying these days that every Tom, Dick and Paddy celebrate St Patrick's Day - when they are not even Irish. What is that all about? My mother is Irish and even I don't celebrate it. I'm all about St George, me.

But anyway, it is St Patrick's Day today - The perfect excuse to go out, get absolutely slaughtered and act like a prize turnip and I thought being a smidgen Irish I ought to recognise it with a blog post.

As you might know from earlier blog posts, one of my hobbies is tracing the family tree. The Irish side of my family proves quite tricky as the records aren't so easy to come by as they are here. My mother is from Dublin and I have discovered that her grandparents and their parents were also from Dublin. Alas, as many people living in Dublin at the time were, they were rather poor. My great-grandparents were all born around 1907 (I knew my great-grandmothers well) and from what I have read Dublin was not a pleasant place to live. There was a lot of poverty, disease and ill-health within the tenements in inner city Dublin and as I know where they lived from the 1911 census, I know that this is what they would have faced on a daily basis. The death-rate was horrendous and not helped by the over-crowding in the slums.

You may have seen Chris Moyles on Who Do You Think You Are last year. His family were from the exact same area, street in fact, that one of my great-grandmothers lived in at the time of the 1911 census when she was 4.

So tonight, I shall not be drinking a pint of Guinness and donning a "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" hat., because, I'm not Irish. Instead I shall be quietly raising a glass to my long-departed Irish grandparents and great-grandparents and thinking about what a bloody great knees up they would have been having tonight! They may have not had much money, but they knew how to enjoy themselves!

love & kisses
Mrs M x