As I write, the Athens Irish Festival is underway. No-one up in the wild north received an invitation. Not that that’s a problem in itself; it is the “Athens” Irish Festival, after all. The clue is in the name, as they say. However, what annoys me – apart from the mad story-telling banshee opening the festivities – is the paltry one-hour time slot allocated to the session, scheduled for 6pm tomorrow, Saturday, June 24th. Nobody will be there. Moreover, as far as I know, nothing is being done to accommodate musicians new to Irish music. My guess is the that it will be a de facto rehearsal for some of the musicians playing on Saturday and Sunday; it won’t resemble in any way the participative event we organised last year. I hope I’m wrong.
Staying with the festival, it does seem rather cliquey. And I wonder if the same is true of the Greek Irish Society. They take fuck all interest in anything that’s happening up here. It never occurs to them, for example, to organize an event here or, at least, to ask us to organize an event for which the Athens-based members can use their connections to get us some sponsorship.
To be fair, it may not be their fault. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was a member of the Riyadh Irish Society – there was no Saudi Irish Society. It was left to Irish citizens in other cities to form their own clubs or societies, so it might be a better idea if the GIS renames itself the Athens Irish Society, while we in the Greek version of the abandoned Six Counties crack on with our own association.
An Irish lady asked me if we would play a few tunes in her garden here in Nei Epivates. It was her 50th birthday and she wanted to invite friends and business associates. As I have said elsewhere, the weather was unsettled in May and for about 20 days in June. All forecasts predicted rain. With that in mind, we approached the Crazy Donkey bar and asked for permission to play there on Friday, May 26th. Sheila, put €100 behind the bar to quench the band’s thirst. She also tried to get people to do set dancing! She’s a great personality. My guess is the bar did its best business of 2023. A few days later I went back to the bar for a quiet beer. I was barely acknowledged by the owner. Not a word about the previous Friday. I wanted to ask him if he realised how big I was in the village!!!
We had our “final” session in the Dubliner on Sunday, 11th June. Again, we were on form. And, surprisingly for this time of year, the bar was quite full, possibly due to the unseasonal bad weather. My son, his dog and I took the boat from Nei Epivates to the port of Thessaloniki. As we walked from the boat to the bar, it began to rain quite heavily and persisted for the rest of the evening. Our next session should be on 10th September, but it’s the anniversary of the bar’s opening on 7th or 8th July, so we might do a session or a gig on 9th.
