Omnibus return-to-work blog

Hello all. I've been back from my holidays for a week now, and I would like to tell you that it's great to be back. But that would be a big fat lie because I'm back to a stream of mealy-mouthed emails from management announcing the redundancies of good colleagues and the continued takeover of academic leadership by people who have literally never taught a student or done any research.

I have had a good holiday. I went to a conference on the way: the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History in Bangor. It covered philosophy, language, music, literature, art, economics and human geography and much else besides. I tried to go to sessions outside my immediate field, and to postgrads' papers on the basis that a) the young are there to be intellectually preyed upon by fading has-beens like me) and b) they might like the support and appreciation of a decent turnout. I went to a lot of presentations, missed lots I wanted to hear I especially enjoyed Jessica George on Mary-Ann Constantine's wonderful novel Star-Shot, David Lloyd on New Directions (the American periodical which supported lots of Welsh poets), Catriona Coutts on Germans in post-war Welsh literature (essentially viewed as nicer than the English), Emyr Glyn Williams's freewheeling exploration of Y Naid, a philosophical perspective informed by the primacy of the Welsh language in Welsh culture (Emyr also founded and owns Ankst records, which received all of my pocket money in the 1990s and beyond), Katie Gramich's keynote on camouflage, Dorothy Edwards and Rhys Davies – I can't laud Edward's novel and short story collection enough – Daryl Perrins' analysis of Welsh TV comedy, which started the usual arguments around language and included the claim that there aren't any urban working-class Welsh-speakers, Andy Webb and Seth Twigg's superb analyses of RS Thomas's poetry (the early days for Seth, the influence of Edward Thomas for Andy), Diana Wallace's discussion of how Chris Meredith writes about work, Poznan University's Marta Listewnik doing an amazing analysis of phrasal verbs in Welsh literature and speech, and a virtuoso reading by Ceri James-Evans (an MA student) of Gwyn Thomas's slippery use of deixis - particularly 'that' in Oscar.

My own paper was on Celts and Celticism in video games - something that hasn't been looked at in detail before. I think it went quite well - there was a lively discussion, some people had played the games I talked about, and a magazine has invited me to write a piece based on it, which is very nice.

After that I dashed over to Ireland for a family gathering: a ferry journey, five hours in a hotel then the 7 a.m. train to Co. Kerry for mass and a glorious 50th wedding anniversary celebration (no, not mine) which lasted long and loud. There followed a couple of weeks of reading, crosswords, the occasional day trip (including to the Burren, an otherworldly geography I'd always wanted to see, culminating in the famous Puck Fair and an encounter with some very relaxed hares. I did almost run out of books but eked them out sparingly. If you're interested, I read Nick Harkaway's Gnomon (bold, some lyrical passages, thought-provoking at a sixth-form philosophy level but unjustifiably overlong), Emma Donoghue's Frog Music (enjoyable and very moving Sarah Waters-esque neoVictorianism with a couple of superb characters), Antonia White's The Sugar House (beautifully written and heart-breaking, but perhaps too retro-Catholic for contemporary, secular readers), Nancy Mitford's Highland Fling (Wodehousian giggles plus some sharper observation of human psychology than PGW assayed, highly-recommended), Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City which I had to buy again and have delivered mid-holiday because I lost it somewhere along the way (always like the characters particularly Mrs Madrigal, and the advent of the 1980s is done beautifully, but the Jack Jones plot didn't work) and finally Schlink and Popp's Self's Punishment which I didn't like very much. Decent plot, and the aged detective's frank admission of his Nazi past was good, but he felt like an old man's fantasy: cocktail-drinking lecher keeps attracting younger women to his bed. Since I got back I read Tracey Matthias's Night of the Party which wears its good politics on its sleeve but doesn't do much else, and Paul McAuley's eco-SF Austral, which worked very well and neatly incorporates a retelling of Tristan and Isolde. Next up is Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley, of which I've heard good things.

Anyway - here are some of my favourite snaps from my holidays. You can see more here.

Inch from Cromane

I do like taking pictures of selfie-snappers

The Sceiligs

My lovely horse

Like father, like son

At the fireworks

Poll na Brón, the Burren

Hot-dog seller, Puck Fair

Roof, Kenilworth Castle

I'm not a dog person but these two caught my eye.

Stairs, Kenilworth Castle

Grafitti, Kenilworth Castle

More stairs, Kenilworth Castle

"You can't beat the West Coast, Mrs"

Well, I'm back. I was in Co. Kerry, Ireland for the famous Killorglin Mid-Kerry Puck Fair.• It rained a lot and I read some books (Three Guineas, The Nigger Factory, Tales of the City, Sheila Wingfield's Collected Works (thanks, Canon!), The Just City, Brick Lane, Fight Club, The Wretched of the Earth and Little Brother, ate far too well, saw a play about Jimmy Gralton, went to the Vermeer and Co. exhibition, and took some photos. In other words: perfect. Below – a few of my favourite shots. The rest are here.

Handheld! 

At the fireworks

Also at the fireworks

Despite being called 'Chilled Cans' and being held up by scaffolding inside, this place insists on pouring Guinness properly even with 10,000 people waiting. Unlike every single pub in the UK. 

Tork Waterfall, Killarney

The Skelligs from near Waterville

I return to the cheery news that our faculty management, which has never been less than profligate when it comes to its own pursuits, has decided to cut costs by withdrawing the sweaty but free cheese sandwich it gave staff who came in on Saturdays to run Open Days. As a symbol of mean-spirited and misdirected economy in HE, said sandwich really takes the biscuit.

•It's only a Mid-Kerry festival according to a man from Castlemaine. He also told us his mother's house rules for Puck. 1. Don't vomit on the sofa. 2. Don't bring back any Beaufort girls. We didn't get to learn what she had against them.

Ramblings in and on Ireland

Hi everyone. After a couple of weeks in lovely County Kerry, I'm back at my desk and (obviously) raring to get back to work. Despite reading two newspapers a day, I've managed to avoid developing any new opinions or topics about which to get outraged while I was away - it's like all the bad stuff was happening behind a screen and I could observe it all without needing to express any kind of view.  So very restful.

Anyway, apart from reading newspapers, I read a lot of books and went to the famous Puck Fair, did some cycling (including a quick go on Gene Mangan's last competition bike, a wonderful Mercian), attended the Beaufort Threshing Fair and took a lot of photographs of birds, bees, farmers, cattle, mountains, goats and all sorts of delights, all of which are here. The ones below are my favourites - click on them to enlarge. I know I could be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about Ireland but the rural communities are still hanging on and fairs are one of the places where the hill farmers, travellers, hippie remnants and others come together and anyway, I'd rather wander round a horse fair than sip soy lattés with some trustafarian hipsters in Dublin.

OK, some hipsters are also blacksmiths. Some of my beard-loving friends will swoon for this chap

The classic 'get the ball through the hoops with the blower' game

Hay-tossing competition

Brother and sister Irish dancing

Yes, it's a game involving shopping trolleys mounted on a revolving platform. There was also a digger bucket challenge. Though no Tunnel of Goats

I just liked this bee and the lighting

Derek Ryan - Daniel O'Donnell's less-threatening successor. But I liked the shot.

Good to see the old cons are still alive

Their father actually asked me to take this shot

King Puck and his Queen

Father and Son at the Cattle Market

I spent ages trying to line up the cattle with the burger joint in the background

The winners of the Fancy Dress competition: Elsa and, er, her consort

Corny yes, but I couldn't resist. Very grainy because it was 2 a.m. and I prefer not to use flash

A good session in Francie's.

Sean O'Sé and photographers - chosen for the framing

Handheld shot of a fairground ride

Slightly intimidating

Watchful publican outside the Kingdom Bar

As to the books - the two Albert Campion novels were fun, The Soft Apocalypse was flawed but nicely textured (and I'm not sure that the pitfalls of the dating scene will be of prime concern in a dystopian America), Edgeworth's Belinda was sharp, witty, thoughtful and thrilling…for the first two volumes. She really needed an editor to stop her there. Vol. 3 is utterly tedious: an exercise in pulling all the strands together so that the goodies' errors are rectified and honour is satisfied in the most boring and contrived ways. A shame as the rest of the novel was so good (though the introduction's claim that the novel is an early piece of anti-racism and feminism is slightly exaggerated, I thought). Roy Foster's Vivid Faces, a cultural history of the pre-Revolutionary generation in Ireland was superb: some new people to me, and such a rounded and acute assessment of the undercurrents that led to 1916 and its disappointments – largely that the socialists, lesbians, secularists, homosexuals, vegetarians, freethinkers and Protestants who did so much to bring about Irish independence were so comprehensively frozen out by the bloodthirsty bigots who took over. The murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington moved me all over again. Finally I read Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, a 400 page doorstopper that took me not much more than a day because it's so very, very good. Who knew you could ram together stories about the Crisis of Literature and the banking collapse, set it (very, very identifiably) amongst the Irish financial elite and make it moving and funny? I haven't laughed since 1987, but I sat on the train giggling out loud. It ends on a slightly conventional happy-ever-after note (not for the banks, obviously) but it's an absolute triumph.

And so back to work once more…