In search of eloquence...

I've decided one of the best things about not drinking is that one can be terribly annoying simply by way of being the only chirpy one the next morning. I may have been tired, but I wasn't hungover. Being obnoxious is terribly fun sometimes. My conscience stepped in at one point to ask whether I should feel guilty about adding to their misery, but of course I shot it down pretty quickly.

We left Killarney at 8:15am. After a week of crazy travelling, I'm no longer voluntarily waking up at dawn. In fact, getting me up is requiring more and more force from those around me as each day progresses. In otherwords, things are back to normal.

First stop for the day was at the castle of something or other (tbc) where the Blarney stone resides. For those unaware of its significance, kissing the Blarney stone is meant to give you the power of great eloquence in speech. The castle is situated in the most lovely grounds. To get to the stone you climb up a spiral staircase way up high to the battlements, where a guy holds onto you and hangs you backwards to reach the stone. You have to lie down like this to kiss it. And they have an official photographer, so you can get a photo and a certificate authenticating your claims of having kissed the stone at the visitor centre when you descend. I went right up to the top for the view, but did not kiss the stone. I like being quiet.


We wandered around for a bit, with the others taking photos of the grounds and me getting distracted by a little waspy-fly thing (will have to work out what it is...) on a patch of some kind of wild geranium. It's times like that I wish I had a good camera on me, it was really struggling to cope with such fine focus.

Toured the Guinness factory, which was interesting but the beer was wasted on me. In fact, on most of the girls in our group, so as a result a couple of the boys downed three or four free pints. As you can imagine, they were pretty pleased with themselves. This here is a view of Dublin from the top. Not enough green. I want to go back to Carshalton.