My mum was Scottish and this led to a little problem with my running of Penny. If the massed pipe bands played my mum's favorite old songs, I started to cry. At one stage I was yelling encouragement to Penny in a croaky voice with tears dripping off the end of my nose. But probably no-one noticed. Thank goodness for sunglasses.
My mum would have loved to have been there!
At one stage as I wandered around, I had a chat with a woman selling Celtic pottery and she told me that dogs play a special part in Celtic mythology. That got me thinking, and when I arrived home I looked in 'Celtic Myth and Legend - An A-Z of People and Places. Because it's arranged alphabetically rather than in themes, I couldn't simply look for 'dogs', but I did read the entry on Cu Chulainn, whom the author refers to as 'the best known and greatest of all the Irish heroes'. Having killed Culann's dog, the hero, then known as Sedanta, offered to become Culann's guard dog, and this act earned him his new name, which means 'Culann's Hound'.
I've wondered sometimes why the words 'hound' and 'dog' don't mean exactly the same thing in English, and I wrote a post about this some time ago on my other blog.
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