Arts Diary: Thursday

There was an Englishman and and Irishman. The Englishman said that John Barleycorn Makes weak men strong and old men young and all men brave and bold. The Irishman said that if you have a little drink from the black bottle under the bar you would wake up clasped to a pig in a loving embrace, the hairs of its little tail tickling your face. Much about the history of Anglo Irish relations good be inferred from this. The Englishman was of course Jack Rutter, one of the best traditional singers going and also one of the nicest people. The Irishman was Derry (pronounced Daori) Farrell , another one of the best traditional singers going and also one of the nicest people. A fiddle player and an accordion player opened for him who were so traditional and so Irish that I had to go and have Guinness to recover,

Rest of day fades into miasma of songs. Sandra Kerr chaired a show about politics and traditional songs. There is a famous ballad about a child on the road who meets a false knight on the road, the false knight of course being death. Sandra had reimagined it so the child was (implicitly) Greta Thunberg. Frankie Armstrong from the workshop sang one about the woman in Tamlin who tells the lady what herbs will deal with an unwanted pregnancy.

The afternoon ballad session was the best I have been to. Frankie sang a long one at the ballad session about a lady who turns into a monster and can only be healed if a man climbs up the crag and gives her kisses one, two and predictably , three. There was a version of Child 1 in which the riddles are set by Jennifer Gentle and Rosemary and what appeared to be a version of Geordie in which Geordie is a prisoner of war rather than a deer poacher, and in which his lady has a whip round for the red gold and gets him off. So actually only like Geordie in that a woman please for her lovers life. (Child 209, it says in my notes.) One brother kills another brother with a little Pen knife and has to answer awkward questions about the blood on his shirt sleeve. I really love these sessions. Perhaps if I eat enough imaginary mango I will one day be good enough to sing at them.

There is a recurrent dream in which you find a door in your house and discover a whole new room you didn’t know you had. The Bedford Hotel is the go-to place after the concerts finish. There is always a small group of musicians having a session, Otter Ale until way past closing time, and some rather bemused but always friendly locals. Tonight it was more than usually raucous. I had definitely not eaten enough mangos to join in very loudly and lacy Island skywalker (*) about my memories of Dublin in the rare old times. A man with a local accent did all the verses of Jackie Stewart, Bill Brewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davey, Dale Winton, Harry Hall, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all and their problems borrowing a horse. I went through A door in search of a chair and found there was a whole nother much bigger bar where an enormous session including the two very authentic and very Irish people from the afternoon were giving it full diddly diddly dee.

I don’t know how session musicians do it. Someone starts a tune, and someone else joins in, and before long there are ten or twenty musicians all playing and adding their thing sometimes for hours at a time. For all I know they are still playing right now. One day I will explain my theory that when we envisage Angels playing music in heaven, what we are supposed to imagine is a folk session. (I believe a minister once said that was his vision of hell, admittedly.)

(*autocorrect offers huge improvement over Lachrymosely)