venta

Quite often, when I phone my parents, there's some sort of breathless scramble at their end as they turn off whatever music they're listening to. I nearly always have music on when I'm at home, and my parents do too... I always assumed that was just what people did, but apparently not.

When I was little, there was always music on in our house. One corner of my parents' dining room was given over to the record cupboard (an MFI job when I was little, now a far superior dark wood cabinet) and it was full... classical concerti, and the occasional Buddy Holly disc, but mostly folk music. Lots of it was bought direct from the artist in folk clubs up and down the north-east - my Dad tells me that when I was little I thought that was the only way you could buy records. He may be winding me up. He does that.

One of the records that reminds me strongly of my childhood is an album called Ring of Iron, recorded by a local group called the Teesside Fettlers. They were one of those rolling concerns that kept going through multiple line-up changes (oh, and still are, apparently). One of the stalwart (and, I think, founder) members was a guy called Ron Angel. On lots of the tracks you can hear him playing the whistle or the fife, the counterpoint dancing happily over the melody.

( Ron Angel )

Every year I have grand intentions of blogging about Whitby Folk Week, and every year I fail because while I'm there I'm too busy running about and dancing and drinking.

I usually then also fail to write it up proper after the fact, because it's usually a bizarre mixture of the surreal and the exactly-like-the-previous-34-festivals and I'm not sure where to start. So I don't.

Instead, this year, I think I'll attempt to write about some isolated incidents (where "some" may end up being "one"). So...

( God speed the plough! )

Just in case anyone was curious about the Daleks, here are the pictures:

( Exterminate! )

When I said I was going away this weekend, I got accused of having a social life. Well, kind of - it depends if you count clog dancing conventions in Lancashire as "social life".

( A mouse lived in a windmill in old Amsterdam )

After that, it was the long slog back down to Oxford. As reported a week or two ago, my car stereo is a little dicey at present and is declining to play tapes, so I'm listening to the radio. I'd observed on the way up that Virgin (which seems to have a much less interesting music policy now than I remember from ten years ago) just wouldn't stay on station in the north. On the latter stages of my journey north I'd switched to local radio, and stuck with it as I set of south again.

( Oooh, radio. I love my radio )