
The bean sà puts me paralytic with fear to this day, and as an atheist scientist that says something fierce. Back in Ireland in the ‘80s, when I was very little, my mother was attempting to brush my long and very unruly hair, and I would wail, oddly enough, much like a banshee. There was a particularly spectacular uproar about it one day (it hurt ffs!), so she had my Uncle Ernie scratch at the window behind me outside and told me it was the banshee coming to match my wails. That put the fear of God into me. Years later my cousin Derek would tell me he'd heard the banshee around my house, which meant someone at mine was going to die. None of this would have been particularly fearsome, I, to this day imagine, had it not been for that bloody banshee in DARBY O'GILL.
