Firstly – and perhaps most importantly, is a Swan Watch update. I have seen the swans again since my last post, and their babies. Sadly, we are down to four cygnets but they are getting bigger which should increase their change of survival.

Watching – I finished the first series of Ponies this week and I’m so sad that I’ve no more episodes to watch. I really want to see what happens next to Bea and Twila but mostly I just enjoy watching the two of them hang out.

Ponies is a series set in Moscow in 1978. Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson play two women who are living in Moscow because their husbands are CIA agents working there. When the husbands are killed, they convince the CIA to let them help find out what happened to them. I really liked it. It’s written by the same people who wrote The Spy Who Dumped Me, a ridiculous film that I really enjoyed. This is a mix of Mad Men and Homeland. The cast are terrific and I also enjoyed the outfits and soundtrack.

Listening – I spent last Sunday listening to the audiobook of Heart the Lover by Lily King. I started it when I was cooking dinner on Saturday evening and finished it on Sunday afternoon because I couldn’t stop listening. It’s so good. It’s about life and death and ambition and first love and the twists life takes. It reminded me a little bit of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, though it’s set in an earlier time period and the characters are aspiring writers rather than computer game designers. I really enjoyed it. Great characters and a really clear voice which I think maybe came out more strongly in the audiobook than it might have on the page. I also thought it was well-structured, and it made me want to go to Paris.

Reading – I started House of Glass by Hadley Freeman this week. I borrowed this book from my sister more than two years ago and hadn’t got around to reading it. I picked it up this week after finishing Queen Esther by John Irving which touches on being Jewish in the years after WWI and the establishment of the Israel. (It also features a whole lot of Irving’s regular tropes – wrestling, sex workers, tattoos, lesbians, unconventional mothers, the windows of Amsterdam, boys boarding schools, abortion, writers – they’re all there. It’s a bit of a strange book; I felt like I spent most of the book waiting for the story to start.) But this, and the death of Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental last weekend and what that means for remembering the Holocaust, brought me to this book whose full title is House of Glass – The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family.

In it, Hadley Freeman writes about the lives her grandmother and her brothers (Hadley’s great-uncles) who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900s and moved to France for a better life in the 1930s. That’s as far as I’ve got so far. Things are going well for Glass siblings in Paris but we know it’s not going to last.

This book feels like a timely read when anti-semitisim and fascism are both on the rise around the world. It is a reminder how recent and how shockingly awful the events around the Holocaust were. At the same time, everyday I feel so angry and so powerless in response to what Israel is doing in Palestine, the West Bank and Lebanon and by the Irish government’s measly mouthed response to the endless violence and destruction. I wonder how will those stories be told in the future.

At the National Archives of Ireland – which I visited to see ANU Productions’ The Good Luck Club about the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes. This is my favourite type of ANU show – it’s about something I know nothing about and I got the opportunity to look around an old, odd building. I really enjoyed the show and it sent me off to find out more about the Sweepstakes, including it’s connections to the IRA. I was surprised how well know and how popular it was. Wikipedia has long list of references to the Irish Sweepstakes in a variety of culture which includes Happy Days, Breaking Bad, Stephen King’s The Stand, an Agatha Christie novel and a poem by Anne Sexton.

Eating – I got my first bag of veg from the Bohs CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) scheme this week. This is run by the Bohemian Climate Co-op. It’s set up so you pay the farmer directly for 38 weeks of vegetables grown in Dublin, which you collect each week in Phibsboro. I’ve signed up for a half share so I get a bag every second week.

I was excited to see what I would get – onions, potatoes fresh out of the ground and lots of green stuff (kale, parsley and lettuce).

If you’re in the area, there could still be time to sign up if you’re quick. Send Katlyne an email (katlyne.armstrong @ bohemians.ie) and get involved.

Finally – NCAD Works opened on Friday June 5th. I’ve only had a very brief look, but so far two things that I liked the look were the pieces created by the Applied Materials (glass, ceramics and textiles) students, and the short films in Moving Image Design.

The show runs until 5pm on Saturday 13th of June and opening hours times are here. Most of it is on the main NCAD campus on Thomas Street, but there’s also exhibitions from the part-time evening students in The Annex just down the road on James Street, and the MFA students are exhibiting in Rua Red in Tallaght. There are also talks and events running throughout the week. It’s a good week to see, and maybe even purchase, some art.