A Very English Weekend

Well, English in the best possible sense of the word, something like I feel when I'm feeling patriotic - combining a strong sense of tradition with an intellectual fertility from a constant incorporation of other peoples' ideas. It started off with a dance at Cecil Sharp House by GIG CB, who play a monthly French/English session just south of Tower Bridge, and the odd Euro-ceilidh, with a mix of French and English dances, at Cecil Sharp. I turned up to find almost no-one there, but I'm glad I stayed, as an audience trickled in over the evening, including some people I knew (Chris, Mike, Sarah), and some I didn't (Mylène, Heike and her friends from the Goethe Institut), and I ended up having a very good time and being able to spread the French dance gospel a little! I almost missed a bus through talking to Mylène and Heike while absent-mindedly walking back towards Camden Road station - I'd forgotten that I was due to go back to Claywell to see Mum and Dad that night.

X90 duly caught from Marble Arch, I managed to sleep all the way from Hillingdon, waking up a few minutes before the bus turned into Thornhills on the outskirts of Oxford. A quick visit to Tushari later, and I had car keys, and I was in bed by two thirty. The house was dark, and cold, and the bedclothes even felt a little damp, but my toes found first one, and then a second hot water bottle left there by Mum, and I was soon warm. Then up! At nine, admittedly, when Dad had probably been working for a couple of hours, for a good extended family chat over some extremely good Honduran coffee, admiring the new kitchen and working out exactly where all the little bits and pieces would go - knife rack here, stereo there, pots and pans elsewhere, cookery books, Mum's collection of teapots. All of this was a sign that most of the work on the kitchen had been finished, and indeed it really only lacked a few days' work to complete. It will be a lovely room, with more light than the old kitchen, and larger, and with all the things like coats and wellies and washing machines kept in the old kitchen, and I can see the stove being used extensively. There's enough willow trees on the farm for the pollarding offcuts to keep the stove going most of the time, and the lovely wide flat top gets anything put on it to simmering point really quite quickly, and keeps it warm if it's shoved to the back.

Into the afternoon, and the usual Claywell tasks begin: muckshifting, in a word. There's a couple of tons of manure from the local byres and stables at the bottom of the garden, and it will all eventually go onto the flowerbeds and vegetable garden. A constant application of manure is basically the main thing that has brought Mum and Dad's garden from greyish clayey field (with lots of rocks that I remember being paid to remove) to the asparagus beds and soft fruit cage that Mum and Dad take care of.


The muckheap in question; this is of last year's pile, but this year's is pretty similar.


Dad, having pulled about a quarter of the climbing rose out of the apple tree - it really liked horse manure!

Into the evening, and off to the Moon again - though this time via a lovely carol service in Yelford parish church, with a new series of readings, including Keeping Christmas, which I rather liked. It was very pleasant to sing the old Christmas carols, and to eat a mince pie afterwards, and chat to the neighbours.

The Moon was unusual that night. For one thing, there was a whole party of us dressed up in carnival masquerade; we had to get ready, first, of course:


Me tying on Tushari's cat mask - mine was a black felt Dottore Della Peste.

I have to say I was probably the only bloke there in black tie, but there were at least a few others with masks on, and a reasonable number of girls with masks and ballgowns - which made them all look like Disney princesses. Especially Lizzie, who had gone to the trouble of curling her long hair so that it hung down in long bangs halfway down her back, and had a lovely feathered mask that got several compliments.

On Monday night it was off to the Wenlock Arms in Islington to hear the Doolallys and Telling the Bees (or Sean's and Andy's bands, as I know them). They were both great - though the PA made the singers sound like they were trying to sing through a mouthful of curtain, and so the instrumental numbers came through better. It was great to sit and chat with Chris, Fiona, Thomas and Diane about everything in particular, and talk to Sean and Andy a little. The pub was unusual; it actually felt like a pub should, with a smell of beer wafting out the door, and a very local crowd (lots of them from boats moored in the canal basin nearby), and selling Fentiman's ginger ale, which I rather like, and shall have next time.

And then on Tuesday, to the Barbican for Christmas Champions, a re-telling of mummers plays and the Nativity story using archive recordings of traditional mummers and midwives from the 1930s blended in with Hugh Lupton's storytelling and Chris Woods and the English Acoustic Collective's playing, acting and singing. It was a feast of fiddles at points, with three going at once as well as Robert Harbron's concertina, and then at other times everything would be silent, the actor-musicians all turned away from the audience as Hugh Lupton told the tales. He really does look like I imagine the Old Testament version of Aslan would - and he caught up the audience, even two out of the three ten-year-old boys I was sat next to, right at the front. The other one behaved pretty badly, but though I found out later that the artists really had noticed, it didn't seem to affect their performance at all. We really did get everything in that performance, East versus West, death, resurrection, pantomime, drunkenness, birth, the cold, food, drink, the pub, the manor house, the stars overhead, charity, money and poverty. I enjoyed myself a great deal, particularly when Hugh Lupton was talking, closing my eyes and imagining all the places he layered up in my mind.