Roamer: A year of yarns has ended and a year of yarns is beginning

They almost dislodged Abba from top of the German charts in 1992, yet an Irish newspaper reported “the Kelly Family has never achieved wider recognition in Ireland, their spiritual home.”

That could happen soon! “I’m inviting myself to Belfast for a concert,” Kathy Kelly, one of the ten singing siblings, announced on this page last June.

She was performing in Kells and Bray and hasn’t come north yet but today Roamer is inviting readers to serenade the start of 2025 with some echoes of 2024.

When Tom Duffy’s Circus toured Ulster in August Ringmistress Candice Taylor greeted a packed Big Top in Jordanstown - “May all your days be circus days!”

She enlightened Roamer-readers about her work. “It’s not a job, it’s a way of life. We’re moving all the time,” she said.

“That’s 45 people, 12 different nationalities, and 25 vehicles, packing up and moving on in several hours “like a finely, well-oiled machine,” Candice added, “everyone’s got their own job, their own routine.”

And an important routine job recounted here in June was reminiscent of Jimmy Kennedy’s wartime refrain about hanging out the washing.

Author and former editor of the Coleraine Chronicle, Hugh McGrattan, shared the little-told story of the 30,000 sodden parachutes that were dried on a North Coast airport clothes line.

They’d got soaked during the Allied landings in Italy and were needed again for D-Day.

From Achill Island, author Mary J Murphy reported last October that it was almost exactly 95 years since the famous Belgian Impressionist painter Marie Howet was first “seized by the island’s voodoo vice-grip” and like many acclaimed artists, painted countless Achill scenes.

It was the centenary of a ‘feat in the air’ last April 6th, the day in 1924 when four American Douglas planes took off from Seattle attempting the first aircraft circumnavigation of the world.

After 363 hours and 7 minutes flying, 175 calendar days, 26,345 air miles, 22,260 gallons of fuel and 1,026 gallons of oil, two planes landed back in Seattle. One of the others crashed and one force-landed. All crews survived.

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines “go up tiddley up up and down tiddley down down” - and so does Roamer’s page!

“From ground level to the base of the underground bunker is about 15 feet,” Alistair McCann explained here in September.

He was describing the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) Nuclear Monitoring Post near Portadown which he started renovating in 2009, restoring the subterranean bunker to what it was like 70 years ago during the Cold War.

“There were 58 of these all over Northern Ireland,” Alistair continued, “and 1,600 of them in the UK.”

The Portadown bunker is about 17 feet long, 9 to 10 feet wide, about seven feet high and packed with all sorts of nuclear monitoring equipment.

“The walls are probably a foot to two feet thick of precast, poured concrete, bitumen tanked,” Alistair continued, “with a brick layer around that which has more bitumen tanking and then there’s gravel and soil on that as well. That would give a pretty reasonable protection factor from nuclear blast and also from the radioactive fallout.”

Former Leading ROC Observer Colin Woods pointed to what looked like a clock on the wall and explained reassuringly, “that needle measures the bomb’s pressure wave going over the top of the bunker.”

Last May war-historian Andy Glenfield recounted film-star Clark Gable’s short wartime sojourn in Bangor, County Down.

And a Bangor resident told us about Jimmy Doohan, Star Trek’s Scotty, whose parents owned a chemist shop in Bangor’s Main Street.

There was sad news on this page in July when regular contributor Mitchell Smyth, originally from Ballycastle, died at home in Ontario.

“Remember him in his best of times, telling a yarn or two,” his youngest son Norman requested.

Hugh McGrattan worked with Mitchell in Coleraine’s Northern Constitution newspaper in the late 1950s, before Mitchell went to Canada, became Travel Editor of the Toronto Star, and regularly shared wonderful yarns here.

And he loved reading your stories too - please keep sending them to Roamer’s mailbox, below, and I wish you all a very Happy New Year.