Welcome to my weekly blog,  SATURDAY SESSIONS!         

In this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its Culture. We explore and discover  Ireland and its Culture - so that's why I call them 'Logs', as in a ship's (or Star Ship Enterprise's J ) logbook! 

Each Saturday, I hope to post an extract from each of the Logs.

Below each extract, we have a corresponding extract  from the Mining The Text section which focuses on the use of English involved in creating the paragraph.

In our Course, participants sit back and listen first to a recording of the reading, then we read it together, look at how it was created and discuss the content involved!

In the afternoons and evenings, we go out, explore and discover!

If you wish to ask me any question about the text, by the way, just send me an e-mail at greg@bluefeather.ie

EXTRACT FROM LOG 8, GUINNESS & JAMESON

Ireland and Scotland are renowned for their whiskies. Scotch whisky is spelt without an 'e'. The word whiskey comes from the Irish word uisce which means water. It's short for uisce beatha (pron. ISHKA BAHA) which means the 'water of life', aqua vitae. Maybe this is because of the medicinal properties of whiskey (or any alcohol!)  which is a kind of an antibiotic.

          The story is told that during the Golden Age, Irish monks went over to France to visit their colleagues. Although the Irish monks spoke Irish amongst  themselves, the language of communication (lingua franca)  at the time was Latin, just as English might be regarded as the Latin of our times.

          The Irish monks saw that the French monks had succeeded in distilling perfume and so they returned to Ireland with samples of the French monks' perfume. 

'The perfume has a lovely scent,' they said to one another in Irish, ' but you can't drink it!' 

          And so, using the same process of distillation, they created whiskey and called it uisce beatha!

           They were right! It is the water of life! (In moderation, of course!) The alcohol content of whiskey actually works to relax your blood vessels, allowing your body to better respond to infection by allowing the mucus membranes to ease, thereby relieving congestion. It's also an antioxidant which helps prevent cancer.