Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

At school I had a lovely friend called Karen. We both live in Limerick, so we used to travel to and from Waterford together every few weeks. Our parents would take turns collecting all the Limerick crowd (and some Galway ones too), and me, Karen, Rob and Rory were quite the little gang.

Karen turned 21 a few weeks ago, so she had a very large party on Saturday night. She lives in the gate lodge of a castle her aunt and uncle own, but they live in South Africa, so her family looks after it. There's a deer farm in the grounds of the castle, and absolutely oodles of space.

The party was held in Karen's house (although previous parties have been in the castle itself), with a big marquee on the lawn. We all brought tents. Most of the people there were Karen's friends from Cork, but there was a nice group of people from school there too. Janette (who studies Documentary Photography in Newport) had caught the ferry that morning (passing through Bangor on the train) and had brought one of her housemates. Ali had brought her beau, who she's building a house with. Poppy lives with Karen in Cork so she knew all the Cork crowd. Dave knew the Waterford people better than us, but joined us later in the evening. There were various other people who'd been in different years at school, excellent people like Steve and Abi.

It was such a good-natured party. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming. Karen's family are real foodies, and cooked a huge sit-down meal for 60 or 70 people (fajitas with all sorts of yummy dips and a zillion desserts). Then there was fire-juggling by a couple who live in a farmhouse in the grounds, which was absolutely brilliant. Karen's brother is a DJ and has lots of DJ friends who provided the music. Oh it was just lovely.

Except somebody left Cava lying around, which is always a bad idea because I felt compelled to drink it, and now my tent is somewhat the worse for wear.

So that took up most of my weekend, what with all the sleeping I had to do when I got home. But we also went to a concert by the Irish Chamber Orchestra last night in the University Concert Hall. The ICO often plays quite boring programmes of popular classics, but this one featured Janacek (whose 'String Quartet after LN Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata' was the subject of one of my final projects), Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Bruckner and a new work by Rachel Holstead. The Janacek piece ('On An Overgrown Path') was originally written for piano, but had been arranged for string quartet. The conductor (James Boyd) had orchestrated it for the ICO, and it was absolutely magnificent. So creative. I'd love to get a recording of that.

Now my dogs are barking. But I had a lovely weekend. I couldn't have liked it more (bonus points for identifying the song).