Spent Christmas in Ireland with family and friends. My sister Val had rented a small cottage in county Kerry, in the south west of the country. My brother Peter flew over to join us, so there was a high concentration of family and lots of accompanying noise and chaos.The countryside where we were staying was beautiful, but most of the time it was obscured by thick curtains of rain - it rained and rained and rained. Good for catching up on sleep, recovering from jet lag, talking, eating, drinking strong beer in pubs and watching television to all hours of the morning. We got out one day and made it part of the way around the Ring of Kerry to the island of Valencia, the rain intensified in the course of the day and on our return, new waterfalls and streams were thundering down the sides of the hills.
One of the stranger moments of the holiday was a drink in the small town of Killorglin, near to where we were staying. That the drink was not in a pub but in a tapas bar was a sign of how Ireland is becoming more cosmopolitan, even in small towns. But stranger still was the fact that the bar was in a converted church. When I asked about it, I was told that it didn't really matter, because it had been part of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland!The picture is in Doneraile Park close to Mallow, where we spent the last day before my departure.
