Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Graz, Austria

We flew from Hannover to Vienna today and took a train to Graz. This is my third time to play in Die Brücke where Doris always makes us most welcome and we get to sample her homemade Schnapps. It’s such a pleasure to do these tours by train and not be tied to a vehicle – we’ve barely seen an autobahn. Each journey is relaxing and you don’t arrive at the gig exhausted from the road. Today while we waited for the train to Graz, Róisín and I took a walk in the graveyard beside the train station at Friedhof Meidling.

When the train arrived Róisín and I got a compartment to ourselves in the first class car and so we pulled all the Pullman seats fully forward and flat to make a bed and dozed all the way to Graz. It was a sunny day and occasionally we could see the tops of trees or a church spire.

I noticed, that in his review in The Guardian of Faber’s New Irish Stories Collection edited by Joseph O’Connor, Nicholas Lezard gives this beautiful quote from O’Connor’s introduction: “Ireland is still a country, for all its innumerable shames, where the empathies involved in the sharing of a story are valued for their possibilities of hope and healing.”

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