Guinness is good for you

I have returned from my New Year's holiday to visit my sister in Galway. Well, actually, I got back the better part of a week ago, and immediately fell over with some kind of mutant virus thing. Not entirely unsurprising as unless there was a vitamin hiding at the bottom of a pint of Guinness I don't think I saw one the entire time I was there.

We drank a lot. I'm Scottish. I'm Glaswegian, no less. I can drink. People in Galway drink like they don't want to live. I drank a lot of Guinness; I'm generally not the greatest lover of Guinness, I'll have a pint occasionally, usually when I want to to drink slowly as I'll nurse a pint for hours. I guess it doesn't travel well or something, because in Ireland I was necking it like it was going out of fashion. I was also drinking something called Galway Hooker, which I was told was named after a type of fishing boat, but I think was named after the inevitable pun about having had a rough night on the Hookers. Also whiskey... we'll circle back around to the whiskey.

I saw Star Wars. Twice. My sister had made me promise that I'd wait and see The Force Awakens with her when I came to visit. I didn't think twice before making that promise because that was before the film had come out when I assumed it was going to be universally panned and The Phantom Menace come again, so whatever. But then everyone said it was brilliant, and people kept trying to tell me things about it, and I don't have x-kit or any of those tumblr doodads installed so I had a spoiler avoidance strategy that involved scrolling really fast. The result of this was that I dragged my sister into the first cinema we came across in Dublin.

I like Star Wars. I first saw the remastered version in the cinema when I was quite a wee thing. I paid real actual money to watch all three of the prequels. My birthday is on May the Fourth, so I quite often mark it with a few beers and a rewatch of the original trilogy. I like Star Wars, but I don't love it. I love Star Trek; it was Star Trek that defined my geeky childhood.

I read somewhere that JJ Abrams was never a fan of Star Trek, but was a fan of Star Wars, and I can believe it. His recent ST films are Trek as done by someone who once watched half an episode of the original series while doing the washing up; The Force Awakens was Star Wars by someone who loves Star Wars.

(As a aside, one of the trailers was for the new Star Trek film; it looked like fun, it looked like Star Trek: the Fast and the Furious. The other trailer was for the new X-Men movie, which I might have to see just for Sophie Turner as young Jean Grey; one of my points of contention with the X-Men universe is that I really like Jean Grey, and I feel like canon is punishing me for this.)

Like, I don't know how well it held up if you were a hardcore fan, or if you were new to the universe, but it delivered what I wanted in spades: nostalgia and lightsabers.

( The Force Awakens )

We went to see it again on my last night, because I had a stupid early flight and was driving home from the airport, and we were trying to think of things to do that weren't drinking, or sitting in a pub watching other people drink. There really isn't a lot else to do in Galway.

I was there for Hogmanay which we celebrated by getting the DJ to play I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), and getting a wee whiskey for the bells. Things started to go wrong when I got into a debate with this Irish lad about whether Scotch is better than Irish Whiskey (answer: it is), and we tested this by means of increasingly well-aged and top-shelf Jamesons -- that we probably weren't appreciating knocking it back like tequila slammers as we were.

Apparently towards the end of the evening I was demanding to go home. People thought I meant my sister's flat, but actually I meant Scotland, because no-one ever gets fucked-up on whiskey and bounces their head off a midden in Scotland. No siree. I just wanted to be put in a kayak and given a little shove; ignoring the fact that I was on the wrong side of Ireland and would've hit America before I hit Scotland.

Oh, my god. The flat my sister's staying in -- she's got these two flatmates, who both had guests over New Year, so there were six people in the flat. I was there a week and I didn't see any of them. She might have had flatmates, ghosts, really polite burglars, there's just no way to know. It's a cool flat in an awesome location, but the atmosphere is slightly less warm and welcoming than the hostel from Hostel.

New Year's Day was spent lounging around my sister's mates flat, drinking tea and watching Netflix. I was assured that there wasn't the same implied obligation in Galway that there is back home, when you've stayed at someone's flat because you're drunk and incapable, that you fuck off before anyone else has woken up, never see those people again, move away and make new friends. We watched the first four episodes of How to Get Away With Murder, after which my sister and I mistakenly believed that a walk along the seafront would do our hangovers some good. After which we went home, made more tea, and my sister immediately signed up for Netflix so that we could continue watching How to Get Away With Murder.

I don't think I can say anything about HTGAWM that hasn't been said before - it is as mad as a box of frogs, but somehow works because of Viola Davis' awesomeness, and after we're done giving her all of the awards we should invent new awards and give those to her too. I love Connor and Oliver, and want nothing bad to happen to them ever; Famke Janssen, swoon; and I can't decide if Asher is my favourite because of his weirdly sad douche face, his feels for Bonnie, or just because he's played by Matt McGorry, who is an A+ dude in a way that transcends even Asher's doucheness.

Um. We went to a thing called a silent disco where they don't pump any music through the speakers, but instead give everyone a pair of headphones with a bunch of different channels so that you can pick what sort of music you want to dance to, or perhaps even better, turn the headphones off entirely and watch a room full of uncoordinated, intoxicated eejits jump around in silence to wildly conflicting beats that only they can hear.

There was a day when we were given a bunch of free food. The landlord of the pub where we were watching rugby bought everyone a free pizza; I'm guessing it was some kind of promotion, but still, that's never happened at home. And then later we were in a posh chippie (they let you sit down and gave you your food on actual crockery in anticipation of getting it back unsmashed) and they forgot to put cheese on my sister's burger, and gave us a plate of calamari and deep fried courgette flowers to make up for it. That might happen at home, but only if someone had a job lot of just about to turn calamari.

With the aim of doing something that didn't involve alcohol we went to the Atlantic Aquarium, which was full of fish that I am much more accustomed to seeing on a fish shop menu, but was an excellent place to stroll off a hangover out of the rain.

And that's what I did on my holidays...