For quite some time I have wanted to return to Northern Ireland for a holiday but never got round to it. So today took the plunge and booked a six day trip at the end of April and beginning of May with the National Trust. Although I have travelled quite a lot in Southern Ireland and also been to Port Rush and the Giant's Causeway in the north I have never visited Belfast.
I think as you get older history plays a more important role. So I am looking forward to visiting some of the historic areas that I once studied at school and saw so many times on the news. There were other places that we wanted to visit as well. Primary amongst these were trips to Berlin and Dresden in Germany and Krakow in Poland.
Krakow in itself is apparently a very interesting city, but the main point for the trip there would be a visit to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Not your usual holiday destination, but somewhere I have always wanted to go.
Man's inhumanity to man has always been one of the most distressing aspects of our existence. It's a topic that I find myself returning to often. Nowhere was this more evident than with the Holocaust. I have never really comprehended the scale of the slaughter despite seeing numerous films and reading many books on the subject and visiting museums. There is still something in my understanding that is missing and I'm hoping a visit to the camp would help me to really understand just what went on and maybe answer the major question of WHY?
They say you never hear a bird singing at the camp, as if there are just too many ghosts, as I'm sure there are. Man's inhumanity is something underlined in the John Boyne book I have just finished reading and which I mentioned yesterday. The Absolutist is about the First World War and the futility of young men being used as fodder in a conflict that nobody really understood. It is a frightening thought that had the current generation, including my two sons, been born 120 years ago they could have been fighting in the trenches of France. That's a very sobering thought.
Anyway our Ireland holiday will be more about rolling hills and grand properties. I just hope they don't move Norwich City's home game against Liverpool from the Saturday to the Sunday so that we miss it. I see that the FA Cup Final is scheduled for the day after we return home. Norwich must have as good a chance of reaching the final as they have ever had. A win over Leicester in a couple of weeks' time would put them in the quarter-finals and just two wins away from a final they have never reached.
On a lighter note Norwich manager Paul Lambert was already high in my estimation but has just gone higher by banning his players wearing gloves during matches. I have always thought the sight of players with gloves to be slightly ridiculous. Any player with cold hands is just not working and running hard enough.
Well that's it for today's blog. A blog that when I started I was unsure of what to write. But once I got started I didn't really know how to stop. Tonight I'm round a friends for this month's music club. It's a group of mates that get together each month just to listen to music. Tonight I will be playing the likes of The Maccabees, Frank Turner, First Aid Kit, Leonard Cohen, The Civil Wars, Lana Del Rey and Smith and Burrows.
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