When pop star Florence Welch was asked to an Irish literary festival, she took her father Nick Welch along – and he loved it
One day, my old friend Viv Guinness sent me an email. She wondered whether ‘the daughter’ Florence (aka Florence + the Machine) might like to feature at the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas in County Carlow, a couple of hours south-west of Dublin.
Flo was back on the phone within a day or so and absolutely on for it. The clincher was the presence of Jeffrey Eugenides, an author whom I had not read yet, but is adored by my children and their friends. Most delightfully, I am allowed to come, too.
County Carlow is rolling country, with some green mountains to the south, and Borris House is a wonderful, somewhat sombre confection, with an elegant but thoroughly lived-in interior.
It has been the home of the MacMurrough Kavanagh family for centuries. They are engagingly around and about during the festival.
Florence has a perfect room at the top of the house. I’m suddenly disappointed that I helpfully agreed to be downgraded to a local B&B. But then I am a gilded hanger-on, not even a real author – I suppose I could claim co-authorship of Florence’s being.
Within minutes of arriving, I am meeting some of many new best friends, including Barry the man on the door who keeps the riff-raff out of Borris House.
By now an experienced ligger, I know it’s always useful to get on good terms with security personnel. They know where things are and who does what.
A chatty fellow, Barry informs me he has been looking after HRH (Prince Charles) who was in Kilkenny a week before. Apparently, HRH had been very well received and enjoyed himself so thoroughly that he stayed rather longer than expected.
There is a green room in Borris House where the writer-talkers can hang out, and it is actually green – the walls an old, very muted shade of eau de nil, hung with family portraits – with a magnificent dining table around which they all sit.
The writers appear a little preoccupied, as well they might, having to talk in public about what they wrote in the quiet privacy of their garrets.
Richard Ford seems impossibly handsome and gives me clear and sensible advice about my cricked neck (Ibuprofen, not paracetamol). Jeffrey Eugenides looks rather dapper and less preoccupied than most. My own mild concern is for the man who will be interviewing Florence in an hour or so.
He is Fiachna Ó’Brionáin, a member of the band Hothouse Flowers and now a broadcaster as well. He is a most charming man – dark suit, dark hair, with a fine grin. He is, however, a little worried about what he’s going to do with Flo. I call her to suggest that she finish primping and come down for a chat with him. I feel I might have almost earned my corn as I leave them to it.
The interview goes very well. Flo makes an absurdly obvious point about pop-song lyrics, and why she does not print them on her albums. They can often, she says, unlike poetry, appear banal when simply printed, as their magic comes from the musical context and rendition.
Another wonderful inhabitant of the green room is the American writer Edmund White, exuding something of the air of a Southern gentleman of a certain sort, despite having been born and brought up in the northern states of Ohio and Illinois. He is a delight both in the green room and on the stump.
We have supper in one of the tents that have been put up on the lawn.
Writers, presenters, punters, liggers and locals all swirl around in constantly shifting, friendly drinking configurations.
Even normally abstemious, sensible folk are reeling about, glasses in hand, with a broad grin and sparkling eyes. Ireland has them in its boozy embrace. One guest is later found trying to crawl on all fours to the pub.
Suddenly, there’s riotous giggling in the normally studious, restrained green room. The young girls who set up and now run Florence’s book club have arrived from Dublin. They and Flo are delightfully excited by the whole thing and by the sheer proximity of soooo many authors. Between Two Books was started by two teenagers in Dublin and is now a worldwide phenomenon with more than 70,000 subscribers.
Then I spend an hour or two in the drinks tent with a lively gang of younger locals, and conversation moves far away from literary topics. We ramble around the issues of British/Irish history and relations without falling over ourselves.
I am at some stage reassured about a certain line of behaviour that I have adopted occasionally over the years: normally at about 9.30 during a pub evening with friendly Irish people, I make weeping apologies for the appalling behaviour of the British in Ireland over the centuries. When I tell my new friends of this, they smilingly assure me things have moved on a bit, and that too much history isn’t always a good thing.
That evening, Florence interviews Jeffrey Eugenides, without appearing too starstruck. It is, she admits, quite refreshing to be the fan talking to someone who doesn’t really know who you are – Jeffrey isn’t particularly aware of Flo’s oeuvre.
Flo turns in and I make it to the local pub, O’Shea’s. Flo is not a party animal these days but announces that she is more than happy for me to keep the Welch flag flying into the wee small hours.
We are preparing to depart, and I sit for the last time in the green room, waiting for our cab to arrive. A new writer/presenter has arrived.
‘What’s the time?’ she asks me repeatedly and nervously, as her session looms ever closer.
‘Seventeen minutes to go,’ I say, ‘but don’t worry – it’s all very friendly here. I’m sure it will all go very nicely.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘you don’t understand. There are a number of people here who don’t like me very much at all.’
It turns out that she is the chief literary critic of the Irish Times and has had to be less than complimentary about a number of authors. Some of them, she adds, are present and, furthermore, she has now published a novel herself.
Oh Lordy, what a brave woman. She has my sympathy, as a gamekeeper turned poacher – or is it the other way round? I leave her with Jeffrey Eugenides, having ascertained that she has been complimentary about his work.
Her name is Eileen Battersby and her novel is Teethmarks on My Tongue and I hope her session went well. Sadly, Eileen was killed in a car crash the next year -– 2018. Now, more than ever, I hope that her session went well.
There is a special – perhaps Irish – lightness of touch to the Borris House Festival. It is utterly lacking in pretension – compact, informal, informative, friendly and constantly engaging on any number of levels. It has an extraordinary range and quality of writers and speakers who may be attracted by that same lightness of touch.
I thoroughly enjoyed it on many of its diverse levels and hope to return in the future.
