While the rest of the country enjoys a bank holiday spent on the couch, absent-mindedly picking the sweat-residue from around the buttons on the Sky remote, down in Cork we’re celebrating our annual jazz festival.

It’s a great yoke, The Jazz, involving lots of outdoor trumpeting, artisan stalls selling vegetarian bangles, and queues, queues, and more fucking queues. Still, we’re rewarded for our patience with more drunkenness than you could shake a vibrating oesophagus at, and that’s the main thing.

Like all festivals in Ireland, The Jazz is well lubricated, and its subject best celebrated by imported devotees from more sincere societies; we just want to get langers, boy. Whether in front of a Louisiana saxophonist or a befuddled DJ wondering if a quick spin of Green Onions is a heavy enough headbutt towards the spirit of the thing, we want drowning, we do. Any stray note that seeps in is something above and beyond the call of duty, and we’re grateful and all, but let’s face it – to the average Corkonian, to the average Irishman, the jazz behind The Jazz is but a delightful excuse. In the same way that there’s fuck all funny about Kilkenny, and there’s hardly any daycent hookers in Galway, despite what the ads tell you.

You might love to think of Cork as cultured enough to care about jazz music, but outside of the bank holiday weekend in October, you’re no more likely to hear jazz in Cork as you are to hear the Frog Chorus pumping out of Derek Mooney’s arse. Not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that; who wants to hear bebop fusion soundtracking every traipse down The Banks? Culture is all well and mighty, but let’s not forget it applies to curdling yogurt, too.

Nah, The Jazz is only a quirky backdrop to alcohol poisioning, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It is nice to see Corkonians come alive from time to time; they don’t prance out as often as Galwegians (thank God), nor do they have the energy of the Dubs. Corkonians do a lot of sitting at home, smoking dope, and The Jazz weekend gets them a bit of fresh air and cleans the chipmunked-trance out of their ears in time for the Christmas house revival. It’s very cleansing, for a weekend that’ll saute your liver. Oh yes.

Which is what I’m off to do now. A pint, a loud pub, and an improvised swing. It’s a good time to be in Cork, and a very bad time for blogging. Life is short – in some cases, much shorter than a jazz solo.

For you lot not getting delightfully baloobas in Ireland’s biggest county this weekend, I share this with you.

Ah, yes. Jazz; musical wanking, but no one in Cork gives a toss.