Did, whether music or otherwise, did creative activities play a part in your life as a youngster, both at home and in education?

Yes, it did.

I started dancing, doing Irish music dancing at around four.

And actually probably did a tiny bit of lepping around the floor in the house because we lived with our grandparents.

My mother moved in when she married my dad and they all just left until my, I think my grandfather died when I was about two or three and my granny died when I was seven.

And she played the melodeon, which is actually behind me up here.

I can't play it, but so she would play it a bit and I would kind of lap around the floor and then they're like, oh, we might send her to Irish dancing classes.

the

... whether or not you are learning Irish music or, or anything, every learning has a level, so we can talk about those.

It has.

I mean, there's the four stages of learning.

So there's the, when you're totally unconsciously aware, you're completely unaware that...

You know, so when you were, you know, maybe two, your mother tied your shoelaces.

You didn't tie your shoe- you didn't even know that shoelaces existed.

They're just not in your, you know, in your conscious realm at all.

But like [laughs] how do you get yourself ready?

Why?

Because it's talking about people's behavior.

So, you know, when people arrive into a session and they're newcomers or they're, you know, there's always something maybe like last week I had a session and I was playing in it and I was the person being paid to play in it.

And then people came from outside of Ireland from somewhere else in Europe, and they'd never played Irish music before and they jumped in and they ruined the session.

I mean, ruined it because they thought Irish music was for everybody and it didn't matter whether you could play or not.

But actually, when you're inside, you realize, no, it's actually for...

It's not that we want to exclude people who don't know about it, but just come into it with a bit of respect and then you're more than welcome.

This is something you said it at the end of your podcast episode.

I can't

believe it.

Anyway, he was about 25 and I was like, well, actually, I could be his mother, but I'm not.

Yeah.

So anyway, so I started when I was about nine on the guitar and my sister, who's a year younger, started playing the fiddle.

So she would teach me little bits and pieces of the fiddle.

So I kind of started when I was about nine through her.

so how does how does that anxiety show up in your experience with people and what's a few hints to providing the antidote to that

I love that.

There's a really sad tune that I play.

It's a slow air and it's about the drowning of it's called Watchu or Maya Watchu, which is either the drowning of Matthew or Mary's Matthew and Mary is supposedly the mother of Matthew who drowned.

It was a young couple that, I suppose, around the early 1900s, late 1800s, when there wasn't have been a lot of employment or anything in Ireland, really.

There was a young couple from Kilcar, another area in Donegal, not far away from here.

And so they were about 16 and the girl.

had access to, I suppose, a bit of money for a passage to get across to America.

know that.

So how, what do you think will make one to stand out and miss the credit space?

I suppose I'm lucky in that my I don't have an awful lot of competition in my audience so but at the same time in Irish music in general there will be quite a few not a lot but quite a few you know maybe five or six Irish music podcasts but they're mostly about interviewing people about their background and where they came from you know so nothing nobody has really done the etiquette about how to join an Irish music session which is great for me But at the same time, I am aware that I, you know, people have to trust me.

If you're, you know, coming to Irish music new or, you know, if you come into a topic new and you want to learn something, you want to be able to trust the podcast host.

So for me, I have applied for quite a few awards.

Now, that means you're investing quite a bit of money and time into the awards.

But the my podcast has been taken up by some of the music schools in in America.

And they have set up podcast clubs, you know, like a book club where they go and read a book every month, whatever, and then they meet to discuss it.

And then what are three podcasting tips you could offer to beginners who want to start their journey? And that will be