Colm O'Regan: Don't go cold shouldering fun stuff just because it's winter

I've just come from the Portmagee Comedy Festival, a small village in West Kerry that is next to Valentia, Skellig, and America). And they filled community centres and pubs and geodesic domes for a bitteen of a festival around the bank holiday.

“This one’s for the dreamers...”

It’s usually a tag-line in an ad for an exciting new loan product for business owners. The people in the ad have a paintbrush in their mouth as they put finishing touches to the shelving in their llama cheese shop.

While the paint-flecked people in that ad might be fictional, there is a group of dreamers who deserve a mention every year: The people who organise a festival on in the middle of winter.

These aren’t Christmas festivals. There are plenty of these and you could sell tickets to drops running down a window if you labelled it as ‘Festive Glazing Condensation Fun For all The Family’. There is a
societal imperative to Do-Something-Since-It’s-Christmas.

But January is a different prospect. Stay in. Stay home. Put the mind into level-5 lockdown. We nest. We figure the only way to have a hope of holding onto resolutions is to stay at home. The only way to do dry
January is hurl ourselves into our boxsets.

So the people who put A Thing On In January, who light a candle rather than curse the darkness are to be lauded. In fact, they should be accorded the highest informal honour possible in Ireland —“Fair F*cks to Them”.

Portmagee Comedy Festival.

I’m not talking about Michael Bublé swinging by to do the Three Arena. People will go to a big name in a recognised venue at any time of the year. It’s the new festival that requires a leap of faith.

I’ve just come from the Portmagee Comedy Festival (in Portmagee — a small village in West Kerry that is next to Valentia, Skellig, and America). And they filled community centres and pubs and geodesic domes for a bitteen of a festival around the bank holiday.

The bank holiday definitely helps but still you have to take a punt on Irish people going to something. There’s no guarantee. Brigid’s Day is still very much the admin holiday... when the nation catches up on a few tasks it had hoped to do between Christmas and New Year. Vinted was up the walls as people finally tackled that pile on the chair in their bedroom. You know the chair, it’s the ‘USB stick’ of wardrobes.

So putting a thing on is a risk.
Earlier that last week there I was at the Ballincollig Winter Music Festival at the White Horse pub. Eight days — EIGHT! — of things on. It’s been going for years. They have a good venue and at some point in the past said ‘it’s a shame to waste it’.

And the most overt two fingers to the miserable weeks, First Fortnight Festival has been going since 2012. About two weeks in early January, starting on Break The Good Habit Monday. A rake of events across the country with the theme of taking the stigma out of mental health but it still has to entertain and sell tickets and keep going.

The winter festival organiser has to spend Christmas thinking about ticket sales and extension leads and Would Someone Have A Trailer? When everyone else is saying ‘yerra we’ll worry about that in the new year’, the January person is emailing about insurance, whether they get a reply or not.

This winter or next, someone you know will put a thing on, at an unpromising time, on the only
weekend the hotel doesn’t have a wedding. If you can at all, money, health, accessibility, childcare,
eldercare permitting, GO TO THE FECKING THING.

The worst that’ll happen is that you’ll have got out the door.

The best is that you’ve supported a thing that will have legs next year and one more day in winter has
ticked by. And this year, with January looking like it’s extending into February, sometimes you have to spend a day or two dreaming.