Your Friday Five

This weekend we get intellectual. Your Friday Five is here.

Dublin Writers? Festival

The first in our required reading events for the weekend, we indulge in the Ballymaloe Lit Fest below, this festival kicks off on the capital tomorrow. We’re particularly looking for to the storytelling and illustration workshop with Chris Judge. If you need to distract some children this weekend we cannot think of a more perfect event. Also on our click-to-buy-tickets radar is the Joanna Trollope and Jo Baker event ?Reimagining Austen? in Dublin Castle tomorrow evening. We’re currently reading Trollope’s modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility and every morning coming this much closer to missing our Dart stop. For more information see here.

An Ideal Husband in the Gate Theatre

Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners, like all his comedies, has been treading the Gate for the past few weeks and we’ve heard Very Good Things about this production of An Ideal Husband. Less screwball than his babies-in-handbags masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, Ideal tackles blackmail and political corruption suavely with dashes of a confirmed bachelor meets sassy debutante romance. With quips like ?If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it? littering the text we can think of a more witty excursion.

The Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine

This weekend Shanagarry, County Cork, hosts the second annual Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine in the grounds of the famous cookery school. Last year a whopping 8000 people gathered to attend talks and events with authors, chefs, foragers, wine experts, bloggers and journalists. Donal Skehan, Clodagh McKenna and Catherine Fulvio will be speaking as well as Ms Ballymaloe herself, Darina Allen. Check out our interview with Ireland’s original domestic goddess here) Joining the Irish contingent are internationally renowned food and travel writers David Prior and Tom Parker Bowles. A food and wine meets literary festival? Think of it as a book club meeting on a grand gourmet scale. For more information see here.

Fat

This spring the always excellent Science Gallery tackled the benefits of failure with Fail Better. This summer they take on Fat, which doesn’t sound especially cheery but we trust the Science Gallery enough at this stage to render the tricky subject in a beautifully enlightening manner. With worldwide obesity doubling since 1980 and at least 2.8 million related deaths every year, ?Fat? is a timely addition to the Dublin intellectual calendar. For more information see here.

Godzilla!

We love ourselves big budget schlock. One member of the Image Daily team may even have seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier twice in one week? Godzilla is a reboot of the franchise that floundered with Matthew Broderick way back in 1998. This time round Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston is the scientist and Aaron Taylor-Johnston his bomb disposal expert son who decide they need to end the monster. Elizabeth Olsen and Sally Hawkins (the sister in Blue Jasmine and a hidden gem in every movie she graces) represent the gals and we figure with a giant lizard monster terrorising the world, threatening human existence and all that, we won’t have to put up with a needless romance sub-plot.

Jeanne Sutton @jeannedesutun