I was very grateful and somewhat amazed at how many of my readers took the time to nominate The Immortal Jukebox for The UK Blog Awards.

Now I would like to ask you to move to the next stage and vote for The Jukebox (and encourage all your family, friends, and social media contacts to do the same!).

Please follow the link and select Art & Culture from the drop down menu:

http://blogawardsuk.co.uk/ukba2017/entries/immortal-jukebox

As a reward here’s ‘Wonderful Land’ an early 60s guitar instrumental from the one and only Shadows featuring the lyrical playing of Hank B Marvin.

The word ‘sound’ has been playing in my head for the last few days since I met a man who was taking photographs out on the Anne Valley Walk in Dunhill and he greeted me and said: Great to be in a place where you hear not a sound, isn’t it? 

I nodded in agreement knowing that he was referring to the peace of the place but I was half tempted to say: Do you not hear the birds singing and the stream babbling? And what about your heart beating and those cows that are lowing?  Oh, and if you come out here at midday, you’ll hear the dogs chiming in with the Angelus Bell up around the village church. And, hey, if you go on up towards Dunhill Castle you’ll get to hear the swan family.

Yes, the swan family that I thought had flown away are still around and…

Where does the rarest of all rhinos live?

…Ujung Kulon National Park, in the western tip of Indonesia.  It is also one of the most densely populated areas on Earth AND one of most volcanically active as well.

Java’s volcanoes have left their mark on the Javan rhinoceros’ fate in many ways.

They gave the island its immense fertility, rich enough to feed the fast-growing population; that is until man began to poach them.  Man drove the rhino to the corners of Java ‑ out of its natural habitat, toward higher grounds and isolated peninsulas, as far as possible from civilization without actually dropping into the Indian Ocean.

Then in 1883, there was a massive volcanic eruption. Afterwards, as the land began to recover, Javan rhinos — under heavy threat elsewhere on the island — re-colonized. Humans never returned in large numbers, so to this day Ujung Kulon remains a safe haven…

As I was dashing into the supermarket a few hours back there was a little exchange that made me slow down and think to myself: This is one of the things I love most about Ireland and Irish people. 

A woman in her 40s or so called across the car park to a man in his 70s, I’d say, who was just leaving with his bag of groceries:

Hello Tom, how are you? 

Marian, good to see you. Grand thanks and you?

As she came a little closer, Marian spoke again to the man:

Oh sorry, I was mixing you up with your son.

And his retort:

Sure I’m much younger looking than him!

Yes, it’s these little things ~ the way people  come back so fluently with answers that you associate with the likes of Oscar Wilde or Brendan Behan.

Yesterday was one of those days that overwhelmed me. It was overwhelming in a positive sense but I suppose any kind of ‘overwhelm’ takes a bit of processing.

There were all sorts of juxtapositions involved that were to do with time. The whole thing developed out of a visit to the ruins of a church and an old grave site close to Dunhill Castle here in Co. Waterford a while back. I wanted to learn more about the people who were buried there but couldn’t read the inscriptions on the tombstones.

It felt a bit weird to be going to the Internet to find out how I might get the inscriptions to reveal themselves to me. Maybe I should just leave them alone and let the ravages of time take their natural course. But, there on YouTube, I watched a short clip in which a man showed how rubbing plain…