Happy New Year to you all. I was gonna write a blog post on Sunday, the usual, your Sunday thoughts, but really couldn’t be bothered to be perfectly honest. So, I decided I’d do, a little voice recording because it’s a long time since I’ve done a podcast and I’m trying to get back into it. This is the typed version, but you can listen instead here:
I’m struggling with the confidence to do podcasts. It’s really daft. The older I’m getting, the less confident I’m getting. I don’t know if it’s a thing of being over 50, or whether it’s just me. There are so many people I’d like to talk to, and I’ve written about this before.
It’s like this glass wall, invisible door, whatever you want to call it, that’s kind of stopping me from doing it. But anyway, I’m not going to dwell on that. So here I am, I’m back out and about, New Year’s Day was lovely. It’s like a quieter Christmas, but still with the roast dinner and I’ve had a really lovely break and a lot of downtime and I haven’t really done an awful lot, although everybody that’s on my Facebook thinks that I’m here, there and everywhere, but I have so many photos from so many years that sometimes I just put them up. Ones that have never been seen, some that have been seen, but now that I’ve new followers, they might not have seen them. So usually, most of the time I’m 99% sat on the couch, which is not good.
I’m turning into a couch potato. The shredding for the wedding went out the window after the wedding. No, actually I still kept it up, but then Christmas happened and I’ve kind of gone down a slippery slope and there’s hundreds of chocolates in the house still, and there’s still one slice of Christmas cake. I love Christmas cake. It’s like wedding cake, you know, fruit cake. I’d almost get married again just for the cake, but just to Andy, of course, not to anybody else.
So anyway, here we are. We’re in January. I was snowed in, well iced in for the last couple of days, so I managed to get out and about and do a bit few bits; go to the credit union, do a bit of shopping, all rock and roll. I did pop into the Hamilton Gallery, though.
They have this gorgeous exhibition on at the moment; The Winter Gathering, and it’s just stunning. There’s so many artists that are involved in it and it’s really worth going to see. It’s just really beautiful.
But anyway, it was lovely. Then I had a little mooch around Angel World, which is one of my favorite shops in Sligo. And then I just had a little wander and I went to the library, because I’m getting to the stage now where a lot of the books I pick up I can’t get into. And if I’m not into them immediately, then my attention span has gone.
I’m the same in Netflix shows. I remember trying to get into Stranger Things right from the beginning and I just couldn’t. So I parked it and then I did come back to it, although I can’t get into the last season and I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews about that. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get back into it.
I have written a post about plans for 2026, you can read that here: https://magnumlady.com/2025/12/31/from-concerts-to-art-my-2026-vision/ That has expanded a bit now, I did mention about the immersive experience of the War of the Worlds, which I’m going to. But then I saw that Come Alive! is on It’s the songs from the Greatest Showman, but it’s a different story. It’s set in a Big Top, and you get this whole interactive experience before the show, and it’s on when we go to London for the War of the World’s Immersive Experience. So, I’m going to that as well, I got a bit of money for Christmas and that’s paying for my ticket.
So I really can’t wait. I’m such a musical buff and I think it will be really exciting to do that and something very different. I’m gonna be wrecked, because it’s a lot in two days, but it’s so handy because we can fly from Ireland West Airport, which is just down the road from me. And then we can just grab a train from Stanstead and then get into London that way. So it’s all very exciting. I can’t remember the last time I was in London. It’s a bit scary as well because you know, me and crowds and stuff.
I’ve previously written about Ancestry. I’m firmly down that rabbit hole. I’m waiting for my DNA results to come back. But the whole thing about my great-grandmother featuring in paintings by Charles Lamb is just amazing and I’d love to know more about that.
I’d love to know why she posed for the paintings. What was the story behind that? Was she interested in art? I’m guessing she was, because she’s in a lot of the paintings and I just think that’s fascinating. So she was called Bideach McDonough and she was from Carraroe in Connemara in Galway. And I would love to take a road trip down there this year just because I’ve never been there.
My granddad died eight years before I was born, so I never met him. But I’m hearing bits and pieces and it is just fascinating. I love anything like that and I’m just finding out all these random bits of information. It’s really weird because one of the things I found out about Andy’s granddad was that he was a messenger boy in London, in Leadenhall Street. And the mad thing about it is the War of the World’s Immersive experience is in Leadenhall Street. It’s like all these little circles and they all kind of add up and it’s just like you couldn’t make it up. He could have been anywhere, and the show could have been anywhere, but it’s exactly where I’m going.
I don’t know whether I actually wrote about this before. I didn’t meet Andy’s granddad. He died at the same time that we met, actually in the same week, and I’d never met the man, and one night I had this really vivid dream. It was just after he died and he was opening a door to a house and he was beckoning me up the stairs and I went up the stairs and he opened a door up there and there was this blue bathroom.
Blue bathrooms are really, really unusual, even back then, in the 1980s. It was a dark blue and I just remember looking at it in my dream, and then we decided to rent a house. And the house we went to see had the stairs was, as I saw it in my dream, and when we went up the stairs and opened the bathroom door, there was the blue bathroom. I’m a big believer in things like that anyway, and you couldn’t make that up. I’ve never seen a blue bathroom since or around that time or before. It was just wild. Anyway, we did rent that house and we lived there for quite some time.
So, I’ll speak to you all soon and thanks to those that listen, and a big thanks to those that follow the blog. I really appreciate it, and the blog turns 17 next month. It’s like my child is growing up!
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