W. B. Yeats – Elizabeth Hawksley

Singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice after washing one’s hands, even sung silently, must be one of the most uninspiring Government directives ever given. OK, I can understand why they chose it – everyone knows it and it offends nobody, but all the same, you must admit that it’s dull.

A Tudor kitchen

I was thinking of this, when a sentence in a Tudor recipe sudden;y popped into my head: ‘Stir for as long as it takes to say a paternoster.’ Pater noster is Our Father in Latin and it means, of course, The Lord’s Prayer. How long does it take to say, I wondered, so I took off my watch and timed it. Continue reading Must it be ‘Happy Birthday’?

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I’ve just returned from visiting ‘Yeats Country’, namely, Co. Sligo on the west coast of Ireland, following in the poet William Butler Yeats’ footsteps. Yeats had a very varied life; he was: a poet and a playwright; interested in theosophy and the occult; a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; appointed Senator in the first Irish Senate in 1922; a lover of Irish myth and folklore; and passionately involved with a number of women. Any of these would make an interesting post. However, today, I’m looking at places which stirred his imagination as a child.

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) by George Charles Beresford

Continue reading In the Footsteps of W. B. Yeats

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