I've not mentioned it before but tonight's the night..............for Ignite.

Some months back Conor Houghton emailed me - I was in France at the time - inviting me to perform at Ignite.

I familiarised myself with the event - surmised that it will have been Naoise who suggested me to Conor - and accepted.

You can check it out for yourselves but Ignite is an event - held all over the world - where the speaker / performer selects their subject and supplies the organiser with 20 slides pertinent to their subject.
These slides are then revealed to the audience - each one for exactly fifteen seconds - while the performer speaks.
Thus the performance lasts for precisely five minutes.

It seemed like a good idea to me at the time - to accept that is - but as the day approached I became ever more terrified as the rigours of the discipline, that is Ignite, became clearer and clearer to me.

The very selection of the twenty slides posed the need to know, exactly, what it was that I was going to say and, having delivered the slides, discovering just how bound I was to them.
And so on....

Anyway, as I say, tonight's the night and I am in a lather of anxiety and anticipation.

I need hardly mention that my subject is furniture and, in this instance, Irish Vernacular Furniture.

I gave my talk / performance the title: The Guilty Tale of the Dresser, the Tinker and Me.... Conor asked if I would mind if he changed Tinker to Traveller. - It's the times we live in, I guess. Conor will not know, of course, that I have a long-standing affection for tinkers - I mean travellers.

I gather that successful performances are put up on the Ignite Dublin site - so you will be able to judge for yourselves how I got on: if I don't appear you will know that I flopped and if I do you will be able to come to your own conclusions!

I'll not steal my own thunder by showing too much of my hand in advance but here, as a taster, is my title page.