I bumped into St. Vincent at the Electric Picnic and we had a few words. She’d just survived an Other Voices interview with the whispery King and had mesmerised all with a brace of torchy tunes and had popped out from backstage to essay a bit of sinuous shimmying to the mighty music of the Strypes.

Beck was on the main stage, but what the hell. Life is about making choices. And the main arena was a stumbly trek away and involved passing through yet another sluggish security corral. I was adjacently strutting my arthritic stuff when we brushed against one another. “Sorry,” I said, “Sorry” she said. I think this entitles me to tell anybody I meet that I bumped into St. Vincent at the Electric Picnic and we had a few words.

I am experiencing considerable irritation with people complaining I’m rude. So-and-so wanted to be your Facebook friend and you refused. Or, you wouldn’t hook up with me on Linkedin. Or join some other club-in-the-cloud for like-mindless folk.
I don’t do Facebook. I am not a member, if that’s the word, of Linkedin. Or of any other mystical fellowships that I don’t know the name of. I am not being rude. I wouldn’t know how to respond. I am told it would take only 10 minutes to learn, but that would be a whole 10 minutes.
I do the twitter thing - @eamonderry - mainly to restrain my penchant for subordinate clauses. The other great thing about twitter is that nobody can tell when you are ignoring them. Can they?

What a liar Hillary Clinton is. Not that that - or her delight at US forces killing anybody anywhere in the vicinity of anybody suspected of having looked sideways at the USA - Clinton never once in her life voted against war or funding war - or her particularly demented glee at the slaughter of Palestinians - appears to have deterred any of her big-money Irish-American backers or Gerry Adams.
Speaking at the annual gathering of the fanatical Zionist outfit, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Clinton told cheering delegates that Israel’s “very existence is a stinging rebuke to hatred…America’s position is unchanging, our resolve unyielding, our stance non-negotiable…The United States stands with Israel, now and forever… Palestinians will need to do their part by renouncing violence and teaching their children the ways of peace and tolerance.”
She went on to describe former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir - who was wont to deny the very existence of Palestinians and, when she did acknowledge them, to describe them as “cockroaches” - as “one of my personal heroines.”
And yet there is no shortage of people who will yield to no-one in their professed support for the Palestinian cause and go on immediately to express a fervent hope that “Hillary” will make it to the White House. What sways them is an expectation that she’d allow them to continue to posture in the White House on Paddy’s Day and treat them as if they mattered.
I will come back to all that when next I manage to ironclad my stomach. In the meantime, she also lies about money. Like her pudgy husband, sex-abuser Bill, she slavers for dosh. Promoting her badly-ghost-written unreliable autobiography earlier this year, she told ABC news presenter Diana Sawyer that she’d left the White House in 2008 “dead broke.”
“We had no money and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy.”
She was emotionally drained, she moaned, physically debilitated and “hounded” wherever she went.
This was a woman who had just pocketed an $8 million book advance and was charging $200,000 a time for speaking to audiences who probably didn’t care about the cost since they had stolen the money from the poor in the first place. She and her partner in international crime have a $200,000 a year pension for life from the presidency.
She’s as big a parasite on the public purse as the latest (again, rather ugly, I’m afraid) royal baby.
Will people who should know better please stop dropping into conversations that they’d love to see this toxic hypocrite make it to the top of the shit-smeared pole?  

Everybody to their own. I thought half the best acts at the Picnic appeared at Other Voices. Maybe it’s just my taste isn’t too far away from Philip King’s. And hearing the likes of Hozier giving it all to an audience of 150 is a bit special.
And - Little Green Cars, St. Vincent, Asgier from Iceland, Finnish-Ethiopian (really) folk-singer Mira Wagner, SOAK? What more could anyone want?
The fact that, back in the field, Hozier drew the biggest audience of the weekend was a revelation.
London Grammar, Portishead and Sinead totally nailed it.
Chic are the best cabaret band in the world.
Rathmullan House serves the best festival grub ever.
Too much security, though.
The Spoken Word stuff was better than ever, Shane McGowan on Brendan Behan an educative romp through the rambunctious politics of Irish writing.
Mary Coughlan was the best I’ve heard her in the 30 years we’ve known one another. Sassy as law would allow, funny, looking a treat, in brilliant voice. Maybe that was my highlight.
 
Everybody who did that Ice Bucket Challenge should be drowned. Millions would pay billions to sponsor that.