Ceallaigh's Blog

On our last night in the UK, we stayed at a Holiday Inn Express at the Glasgow airport. Sean found a vegan restaurant downtown called The 78 with a set menu and a reggae band playing later that evening, so we took a cab in. On the way, I struck up a conversation with the cabbie about Gàidhlig, and he was able to give me "Ciamar a tha thu," but that was all he had.

Dinner was great, and the atmosphere was cool. It was interesting to me that our first experience of Glasgow was this hip, modern place with a mostly young and liberal clientele. While we were waiting on the cab home, I struck up a conversation with three young vegans sitting at a table outside. The young woman among them worked in government and pronounced Gàidhlig dead. Then she amended the statement to say that there were people trying to revive the language, but they weren't doing enough, so it was mostly dead. The two young men had no Gàidhlig at all and didn't care.

The Ruin of Beltany Ring has received another good review, this time from Rebecca Buchanan of BookMusings: (Re)Discovering Pagan Literature. Thank you kindly, ma'am!

In other news, our new home has weathered its first crowd of Gaels, who came to stay from Friday to Sunday for a weekend retreat and training session. Everybody had a bed, everybody was fed and we even managed to have a wee outdoor fire Saturday night.

I've just finished a brilliant week at Colaisde na Gàidhlig, where I received expert instruction in tin whistle, pipe chanter, Gàidhlig song and Gàidhlig language. Sean and Beth very much enjoyed their fiddle classes together as well.

I met many good Gaels this week and came to know a few more a little better. I also had the pleasure of coming to know my niece/foster daughter (in the old definition of Gaelic fosterage) much better, which is priceless to me.

Sean and I have come away from our experience even more committed to Gàidhlig, which needs every one of her champions. We're also excited to be practicing new instruments together, and I am resolved to dedicate more time to Gàidhlig song (quite a bit more, in fact, though I'm not yet certain what shape that learning will take).

I've been puttering at my Ancestry.com family tree this afternoon to put off the housecleaning and finding little new information in the way of support for my Gaelic heritage. Of course, my father's people were Suhres of North Germany and Sweden (MacCath isn't my maiden name), but I've never felt connected to my father's fathers, and my Ancestry.com researches haven't yielded much beyond my great-grandfather's generation. My mother's people are Patricks, and I have quite a lineage for her father's fathers, but I've had to delete several generations of Patricks and their antecedent Kilpatricks from my family tree because the public tree I took them from many years ago was sloppy the farther back it reached. What I've been left with is the relative certainty that a Robert Patrick emigrated from Edinburgh to New England in the early 1700s and thereafter died in Maryland.