...Let Them Speak Now Or Forever...

...Hold Their Peace... Oh... what? Who said that?!

Couldn't resist this signpost, so I stood in the pelting rain trying to get the right angle while Slant patiently waited in the car. At first I wanted it because of those those two names, Kenny and Attracta (the latter is almost impossible to say in anything other than a Dublin accent); if it had been James and Anne I probably would have let it go. It was only later that I realised what the whole image/message amounted to.

We weren't going to the wedding, but heading home from Boyle, where we, along with our cousin Pat, had some works exhibited in the yearly Arts Festival. Sumptuous buffet dinner in the art gallery (a converted 19th Century barracks): salmon with excellent salad and a very nice red wine. Lovely evening in a local pub afterwards, which meandered into the early hours (still going strong when I was guided home by Pat and Johnny (more pleasantly tipsy than I've been in decades; I cannot believe how much I actually drank, about 6 generous glasses of wine followed by the same in pints of Bulmers).

Next morning, we all had the obligatory full Irish then wandered into town. I had already photographed the SHED I'd found behind the carpark/wasteland at the back of the guesthouse.

Boyle has some interesting little nooks and ALLEYS, but the persistent rain dampened our enthusiasm.

We took our time driving home, stopping to photograph whatever caught our eyes: a bleached WAYSIDE ICON (note the stigmata in the leaking tacks), a window display in Edgewardstown featuring a couple of ZOMBIE DOLLS, an ABANDONED NIGHTCLUB somewhere in the midlands, and across the road a BURNED OUT BUNGALOW.

Finally, as we approached County Dublin, I just had to photograph the dramatically stormy sky, though it was difficult to find anything to put in the foreground. the following were the best I could find:
CORN FIELD
WINDSOCK
COWS

As we drove under that shelf of slate-purple cloud, the afternoon was abruptly eclipsed; rain thumped on the roof and windshield, heavy and meaty as a carwash, decorating the side windows with lacy rills, putting inches on the road surface, cars (apart from rare Kamikaze morons) cutting their speed by at least a third. then, like that, it was gone. We were out in sunshine and almost home.