3. Wool Everything | Postcard + Listings with a special bonus liftout guide 'In The Wool Times'
Bumper edition | Richy Mich & The Coal Miners, Beara Peninsula, and this week's Listings.
Editor’s note: this week we’ve got a monster 101 liftout guide on Wool so our Postcard from the Beara Peninsula and Listings is this separate epistle — with a slightly longer postcard as a result. This will be a one-off when I publish expanded epistles to make your reading easier. Let me know what you think! Thanks a million.
Every week or so, the Boundless Bypass is published — a comprehensive albeit accessible epistle of:
A song for the issue
Musings or longer-form writing on a key topic — find this week’s liftout, extended guide here
A postcard
Listings of interest and intrigue along with a round-up of things that I’m ‘tabs open’ on
Our song* this week is: Subliming from Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners in 2019. I’ve been thinking a lot about the sublime and I’m curious if this resonates with anyone? This track nominally feels like that sense of surrender towards whatever lays next, what is meant to be.
This epistle’s postcard is from a place with many sheep: Castletownbere, on the Beara Peninsula of West Cork. There are some buses to this far-flung, south-westernmost corner of Ireland. My recommendation is to rent a car and take the undulating drive from Cork to the northeast (the real capital) or from Country Kerry to the north, down along the Wild Atlantic Way. This is a trip to be savoured.

The cottage in Castletownbere overlapped with my parents’ wedding anniversary — coincidentally they’d honeymooned on this same West Cork stretch, 44 years before us. We’d scrounged a fleeting moment between lockdowns to make for the western coast and here was our accidental homage to their time on the Beara Peninsula. I didn’t foresee that kind of coincidence could offer comfort, a happenstance promise of hope that light could and would come again. We were bracing to hunker down indoors for the third time and yet we had a stretch of days that glowed resolutely amid the unseen unknown. A place I could nestle into my pocket, a priceless treasure that reflected everything that could be, and would be. A delicate anticipation hung on everything. Now we were surrounded by the same snow-kissed, windswept hills.
The second day we hiked by the water, feeling, at last, the particular, earned freedom that only comes from labouring movement upwards. The water glittered, afternoon light bouncing around my husband, further downhill, as he tried to get the local sheep to face him. We’d seen a sign that said the point is almost nearer to New York than Moscow. I squinted and squinted but of course, I couldn’t make it out. The words echoed in my mind, “Steaming west from the coast of Ireland with nothing out ahead of us but ocean.”
Every time I’ve been on the western Irish coast, I’ve imagined all the people who stared back at the land from the boats they were leaving on. The agony of drawing inevitably away, the salt spray, the pain in your chest at not wanting to go, the wrenching fissures of the ending tossed like bits of flotsam with the beginning. You’re on the edge of everything and you’re facing down a foreign, unquantifiable expanse.
Surveying the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean I envied the sure-footed sheep their view and their place there. Bliss is there and the sheep know it, too. They can stay on land and breathe it in without the questions of leaving, the how, and the when. But I’m a human being and I must simply be grateful for the here and now. Pulling my coat tighter, I turned my back on the ocean that’s called so many towards it, going up and over to the other side of the hill, down the peak of the Lamb’s Head, the trailing towards dry land. There’s coffee with Baileys to be had, the mince pies, the cheese board, and a toast to loved ones. There’s togetherness even while we’re apart; all the people before us knew it and on the Beara Peninsula, that truth found me, too.
What are the Listings?
Listings have traditionally been used to share ‘What’s on’ in Arts and Culture in cities and communities all over the world. They can be innovative and grassroots, linked to activism, and help people find out what’s happening. These are my listings for you — one pal to another.
Listings for Saturday, February 24, 2024
This isn’t remotely new news but two tracks that have dropped in the last two weeks — Love On by Selena Gomez and Training Season by Dua Lipa — that have me beyond ready to go to the sad disco. Back in 2022, flipturn and mxmtoon put out songs called Sad Disco/sad disco, so I wonder, is this our own Roaring 20s? Dua Lipa said something to this effect while on the Hollywood Reporter Songwriters Roundtable and I’m keen for that entire vibe and then some. Subdued but irresistibly dancey pop is something I’ll always say yes to.
As we brace for the final stretch of Awards Season (aka Fashion Christmas), please spend some time with both the aforementioned Hollywood Reporter Roundtable series and the Variety Actors on Actors series. Prepare for some emotional viewing — the Songwriters one led to some dinner-table sobbing from both of us — and I’ve watched this one with Cillian Murphy and Margot Robbie twice. I infinitely love hearing artists talk together and share in such respectful and enthusiastic interchanges.
My favourite interview this week was with Christopher Nolan on The Times’ Stories of our times podcast. I thoroughly enjoy Nolan’s work while also barely understanding any of it — that’s part of the experience for me. Thus is the brilliance of his writing and vision. He said this thing that I rewound multiple times to transcribe that I’ll be thinking about for a long, long time:
“I think cinematic narrative and the way in which it naturally compresses or expands time sort of effortlessly really [is very compelling]. And the way in which the memory of a film and the narrative experience of a film once it's finished is very different to that experience that you're having as you watched it. That's a fascinating thing to me and it really connects back with what I was talking about [with] endings and why endings are so important. Because you watch a film in a linear way; the film spools through the projector at 24 frames a second and your brain absorbs these images one after the other after the other. But when the film ends it’s almost like sort of a domino toppled back through film that realigns what it is that you’ve just seen in some way. When it ends you reassess what you’ve seen and it sits differently and even your sense of the time of it sits differently.” MIND. BLOWN.
A bonus recommendation is making Nolan film scores a work soundtrack. They’re frequently immersive and energizing in a way that helps me giddyup my way into whatever needs doing (Tenet OST is it for me). A safety reminder that if you are listening to the Interstellar OST, you will need to keep the volume slightly lower than normal as a Hans Zimmer pipe organ can blast your ears at any moment!
This week I made the best winter salad of all time that I basically crave constantly — it’s a Roast Winter Vegetable, Tahini, Feta, Pomegranate & Herb salad. This uses up any sad veges lurking in your crisper, you can use coriander/flat-leaf parsley/mint (or all three), and your preferred grain base of cous-cous, quinoa, brown rice, or bulgur wheat. I often toss a handful of chickpeas over the plate and have served this as a side to a tajine. I will say that the pomegranate seeds are the bit that takes the flavour profile into something irresistible so I promise it’s worth hunting one down wherever you are. The leftovers are scrumptious and please tell me if you make it!
It’s winter where I am and my perfect atmospheric TV watch is True Detective Night Country. Season Four is here with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis nailing their leading roles. I have a longstanding intrigue with anywhere that has a polar night (this Nocturne episode The Blue Time is an all-timer for me) and the eerieness of the Alaska setting is chef’s kiss, mwah, everything. A few nights of slightly anxious sleep is worth it for this show. We’re endeavouring not to inhale it all at once though it’s a testing undertaking as this is amongst the most superior prestige television around.
Until the next full epistle, you’ll find the special Wool guide liftout here and a bonus wool buying issue is coming in the next couple of days, too. Stay cosy, Aoife
*Every week’s song is waiting for you at this evergreen Boundless Bypass Spotify playlist. Happy listening.
**Sincerest thanks to the incomparable for snapping this week’s Postcard back in December 2020 xxx