Author: jofreya

Someone has just come round and done something very nice for me and it made me think of the times the people have gone ‘above and beyond’ and in particular a man who was my number one fan.

I have been going to Sidmouth since the age of 15. I have a feeling that I played with the Old Swan Band either that year or the year after and a certain individual fell in love with the band and my role in it. Who was he?

Imagine the days when usually men were expected to ask women to dance – even at Ceilidhs. He was short and bald. His trousers were always too short and his pumps freshly whitened and whilst he always looked clean, if not scrubbed actually, he seemed to pretty much wear the same clothes all the time. Unfortunately for him he was so awkward and lacking in self confidence that time and time again he would go up and ask someone to dance and if they were kind they said, ‘I’m so sorry I have only just sat down and I’m a bit tired just now’, or if not so kind, ‘No’. He wandered lonely as a clod around the various dance halls and marquees and was turned down more often than not.

In steps Jo at 16. A favourite dance was on the cards and I wasn’t going to sit back and wait or miss out so I stepped up to our little socially uncomfortable male and asked him to dance. This one small act, which was not out of kindness but out of a selfish wish to dance and not miss out, in conjunction with the Old Swan Band created an absolute besotted fan.

He always went to Sidmouth and I don’t remember him elsewhere but at the festival. If I was playing he would be there. He would stand immediately in front of the stage and stare. Now this was not a mosh pit. Let’s be clear. These were old fashioned style barn dances and he was the only one standing stock still and staring. I imagine, because of his behaviour, he was referred to by most of the adults around me as ‘Wally’. My being rather literal at the time I took this to mean that his name was Wally and on one never forgotten occasion in the drill hall he came up to me and sort of siddled sideways with his arm out and plucked up courage to put his arm around my shoulder. I said, ‘Hi Wally’. His crest fallen face alerted me immediately to his hurt and he said, ‘my name’s not Wally it’s Max Lazarus’. Not a name you would forget and I never did there after.

I used to have to ask him to move away at times or go further from the stage because he was making me uncomfortable and he always did as I asked. Nothing I said ever seemed to waver his devotion. At that time I was, as I said, 16. Long blond hair and , whilst at the time I didn’t feel I was much to look at, in hind site and with photographic proof….I wasn’t that bad looking actually. Just lacking in confidence. Even when after my 21st birthday I had my hair cut short and went for the androgynous look of the times with doc martins etc…he was still devoted. He used to send birthday and Christmas cards and they always had cheques in them for a small amount to buy myself something. Whilst I felt awkward about this he never took the cheques back and I learnt to accept them. he was hurt if I suggested I wouldn’t.

He even arranged for someone to come down and take photo’s for a solo shoot in Nottingham. He may even have come himself although I have no strong memory of that…I think he did..yes the memory is squeezing out. He booked into a local hotel. That is where the photo comes from that head up this blog. What I can’t remember is if what I am about to describe happened before that photo shoot or after. I am guessing before as it might explain why he came down.

I was a student at Trent Polytechnic doing a degree in ‘Public Administration’ which was politics, economics and sociology..and law. But I was also gigging with the old swan band, doing ‘The Everlasting Circle’ show and other things besides and because I was the only member of the band living in Notts it began to be apparent that it would be useful if I learnt to drive. So I did. But I didn’t have a car. Cathy Lesurf, a very good friend of mine at the time and still a friend now, was living in London and said she was getting rid of her old Lada and I could have it for £50. Body was shot but the engine was pretty good. I went to Kensington to collect it and drove it home. It lasted a fair old while too and felt like a tank. No power steering in those days. But as you would expect it died…irreparably and I was stuck.

Due to the fact that Max had begun sending me cards etc, in my teens, we communicated quite often by letter. He liked to know what I was dong and then he would tell me what he was doing. He lectured at Lancaster University as a Physicist and tried to get me interested in Hertz and other theories..which I tried to keep up with. So, as he was the only person I corresponded with in that way, much like a pen pal, I told him my car had died and I was strapped and not sure what to do about it. In hind site it may have looked like I was fishing but I wasn’t.

Straight away a letter arrived. “I’ll buy you a car and while we’re doing that why don’t I but you a house you’ll be much more secure”. WHAT!!!!!!! No word of a lie. So I wrote back saying thanks for the offer of buying a house but I was hoping to buy my own and was fiercely independent  so that wouldn’t work for me and also I couldn’t possibly accept his offer for the car although it was very lovely of him. My finances, like most students, didn’t improve and he kept offering. So in the end I said yes to help with buying a car. I genuinely thought he would give me £300 or something like that. Enough to replace my lovely old Lada banger with another similarly characterful and tatty charabanc (I know…it wouldn’t have been a ‘site seeing bus’ but I like the word).

He transferred £7000 into my bank account. That’s right £7000. A long with it came a letter that said that I owed him nothing. This was a gift and there was no expectation for me to give him anything or repay him in anyway. Amazing! I bought an 18 month old Ford and a new washing machine for the communal house I was living in.

You might wonder how I could justify such an act to myself. I couldn’t really. I was too poor to continually look a gift horse in the mouth and I had tried turning him down many times. Eventually I decided that he was a music fan. None commercial music has never ever survived without patronage of some sort or another and this is what it was. In his head he was supporting a musician who needed to get to gigs and rehearsals etc.

I shall tell you ore  about Max in later blogs because as you can guess, the story does not end there.

Last night 3 of us booked into an ‘Air BnB’. For all of us it was our first experience. All Air BnB virgins. We had managed to get accommodation with friends for all the others so we had to look for something for the rest.
I was very pleased with how simple the system was. Look, book and pay. It was a house in Liverpool, three bedrooms all with double beds and for the guys a room on their own can be a luxury as they often have to share twin rooms whereas being the only female I don’t.
Along with the confirmation came the instructions. Those of you who have done this will know how it works. Andy drove me there on the way to Liverpool Phil so I could have a quick look at the house, collect the keys and grab the best bedroom of course ..ha ha!
We did check the kitchen..nothing except some T’bags. There were various assorted ordinary T’bags i.e. all the same type of tea just different makes and a jar that was once instant coffee that had the dregs of powder, turned into a brown solid stain in the bottom of the jar..no coffee at all. I was glad I looked because it meant I could at least pick up a pint of milk for breakfast in the morning. Is it normal that Air BnB is only the ‘Air B’ and not the ‘nB’. It seems to me that ought to be sorted out in the name somehow. When you’re on the road and only stopping one night you don’t actually want to buy loads of stuff you can’t keep it seemed a slightly difficult situation. Even a few slices of bread, a bit of butter and some marmalade would have done but nothing….hmmm…doesn’t seem right. I had to throw the unused milk away too as it would never have survived in a hot car. Anyway you’ll let me know no doubt what my expectations should be and what is normal.
Having said the bit about the breakfast I actually thought it was excellent value for money. Ten minutes from where we were playing, clean tidy and comfortable. Just no breakfast.

It did get me thinking today about Bed and Breakfasts. It does come up in conversation so often and Whitby has been part of a song in my trio Moirai.

I may have told you this story before so forgive me if I have. It was, I think, the Whitehaven Bed and Breakfast. They had the whole of the Old Swan Band billeted with them. Most of the dance bands at Whitby at that time were booked all week. You hosted some sessions, did a couple of early evening dances and a couple of the late dances. One night it was our turn for the late night. Unlike most professions it is not particularly frowned upon for musicians to drink alcohol whilst at work. Within the band were several fella’s who could truly quaff the beer…and they did. You have to bear in mind that these dances were two and a quarter hours long from what I remember often hot and very sticky and thirsty work therefore. Plenty of people around usually to help ferry drinks from the bar too. So all in all a great night was had and a little too great by some members of the band. Off we went after the gig, with all the instruments unloaded got to bed, all by about 3am.

The hosts of the Bed and Breakfast might have been relatively new to that Bed and Breakfast as they actually seemed excited about having musicians to stay. This meant that the following morning they decided that what musicians would love best would be music whilst eating…shows how much they know about musicians. Some of the ones I know almost never listen to music because they need clear space form time to time so that when they do get to listen it’s with a good ear and real enjoyment .

Down we trouped and two members of the band appeared to be a stunning shade of green. Skin that looked decidedly fragile and eyes like stained glass and barely open. Once seated the landlord went fiddling down the back of a cupboard somewhere plugging something in, opened the door of the cupboard and pressed go. What was in the CD player? The 1812 overture! With every cannon volley some people visibly jumped and tried to sink lower and lower in their chairs.
Eventually one of them could stand it no longer and stood up and asked them to ‘please turn the bloody music off as they had a terrible headache’.

The landlady and landlord looked absolutely crest fallen and didn’t put any music on for the rest of the week. Sad….

Other noises caused problems too. One member of the band snored so loudly that three of the others carried him, asleep on his mattress, out of the bedroom and as far away as possible on the landing and dumped him there. He didn’t wake until morning and everyone else got a much better mights sleep.

One of the beer quaffers had another amazing occurrence with another band. He’d similarly had a joyful but overly drink indulgent night the night before and had a lunchtime concert. Just before the concert started he threw up in his fiddle case…lucky it wasn’t anyone elses and the fiddle wasn’t in it. An ambulance was called for as they believed his stomach was haemorrhaging where as actually he’d had about four tomato juices in fairly quick succession in an attempt to feel better! Hence what looked like blood wasn’t….fortunately they were able to cancel the ambulance once they realised what and occurred.

Hopefully this hasn’t put any of you off your tea!

Tonight I am in Kendal. The Brewery Arts Centre. I remembered playing here with Tanteeka many moons ago. Tanteeka was myself, Andy Cutting, Alice Kinloch and Oliver Knight. In the first half we played one of my tunes, ‘Claire Conner’s lament’. I always introduced it by saying that it was dedicated to a woman in Nottingham who I hadn’t known well but had seen how much she had touched many peoples lives. She was one of those people who did a lot for others and sadly she died young. I wanted to mark her life by writing a tune in her honour.

In the interval a tall red haired young man came up to the CD stall and he was ghostly pale and looked, quite frankly, deeply shocked . He said, ‘I am Claire Conner’s Brother!! Where upon I was lost for words. What a shock for him that must have been. This was many months after Claire’s death. There he was out for a nice evening of music and a woman on stage starts suddenly talking about his dead sister without any forwarning. I was in a completely different part of England and had no idea she had relatives north of Nottingham. We chatted away and, despite his shock, he was happy the tune existed and I gave him CDs for the family and received a message some time later to say they thought how lovely it was that the tune existed. It came to mind because I’m here but also a band in Germany contacted me only last week to say they would be playing the tune in a concert and couldn’t find anything about Claire Conner on line and was she a famous woman? Well she wasn’t but in a small way now – she is.

The Little Me

Last weeks blog was about being a small child talking about mathematics and other things. I thought I’d go back to the bit that was hinted at in the blog.  The fostered years.

My mother and her mother clashed like billyo. Some of this was due to my grandmother, who was American, having a very traditional attitude towards children. This meant that my uncles received an excellent education and my mother quite frankly didn’t. This, I think, is one underlying reason why she rebelled so much. My mother is highly intelligent and would have been deeply frustrated. Fortunately it never interfered with her love of reading which she still does avidly to this day. But then the swinging 60’s happened and my mother was a teenager. I imagine, like the education thing, there was one rule for the boys and one for the girls. Consequently my mother was thrown out presumable for breaking too many rules and potentially bringing her name and the families into disrepute.

Somewhere along the line she met my father and at 19 became pregnant with my sister . They married, as you did then, without little thought for whether they were suited to a married life together or not or indeed compatible. 15 months later she had me. Barely time to think about life, consequences etc etc. She talked about being pregnant with my sister because I remember her saying that at one point my father had broken his leg and she had to push a very large Scot around in a wheel chair while being very pregnant. She also said the cat used to sleep on top of her bump. Nice shelf and warm too.

It soon became apparent that my mother and father weren’t suited. My mother said about my father , ‘having two children was enough!’. I can only imagine that he was young and immature. I say that but he must have been about 10 years older than mum.Never the less a shock for him too to go from having a girlfriend to having a wife and two children in the blink of an eye. I like to think he matured well as he married a second Mrs Fraser later and produced my half sister. Unfortunately she never knew her father well either as he died at about age 44 from a heart attack as far as I remember .

Anyway, mum threw him out.

She then had a problem. No real income to speak of due to the fact she had no qualifications. She thought about her choices which were either to bring her daughters up in abject poverty or go and get some qualifications. If she went for the later it meant she would have to have us fostered . She chose the later.

She went off and finished her nursing training and then midwifery and then health visitor training.

I have had many people in my life who cannot understand her decision, ‘I’d never part with my children’ etc etc. All I can say in her defence is despite what happened I have always felt that my mother loved us and my sister and I seem well adjusted individuals . More so than some I’ve met who have had supposedly ‘normal’ upbringings. Whatever that may be. I’m guessing two parents of opposite sexes who stay together.

One thing I don’t know is how the first family were found. I’m guessing social services were involved because throughout that period we had to refer to our foster parents as mummy and daddy and this woman who came to visit was known as Aunty Ruth. This happened when I was just under 18 months old and Fi would have been just over 3.

I remember nothing at all about the first family but rumour has it she was interested in fostering because she couldn’t conceive…we arrived and within the year she did. Conceive that is. Apparently that does happen. We’d only been with them a year and she didn’t want us anymore. Over that first year  we had got to know the next door neighbours, Gladys and Birt  or probably more realistically they’d got to know us and they said, ‘We’ll have them”. Some how this was all agreed to. Could you imagine social services doing that now? Oh – you can’t have them anymore..what about the people next door. They look nice enough!

We were fostered in total for four years so that means I must have been five and a half when we went back to mum and Fi just coming up to 7.

Throughout my life my sister has been there and we have never been separated from each other thank god but she joked all the way through life about how she’d ‘brung me up”. I just used to laugh and it was well into adult hood I realised that she must have felt an incredible responsibility towards her little sister and what a pressure for someone who was only a little munchkin herself when all that happened. She really must have felt she was bringing me up.

So, what do I remember about Gladys and Birt?

They had  two children Geoffrey and Nicola. 18 and 16 respectively. My sister remembers being dangled over the stair rails by her ankles by Geoffrey and I have a vague memory of one or other of us getting a needle stuck in our big toe because a lost one was hidden in the carpet.

I also remember that I was a little tom boy dressing as often as possible in shorts and a T shirt and my sister was more girly than me. Nicola, to my little admiring eyes, was gorgeous and everything I aspired to be on growing up. I have a clear memory of sitting on a high stool watching her applying make up and being totally captivated.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I know that in my high chair stage I liked pinging spoons of food around the kitchen..who doesn’t and that if I played the clown and made people laugh they would like me at least and may even love me! I still find that often works these days although I am far more aware of why I might do it and whether I need or want a specific person to like or love me. I no longer want to be loved by everyone but throughout my younger life I tried so hard to be liked by everyone…even people I didn’t like much myself. How barking is that. It didn’t always make people like me either as I find out on more than one occasion in my life.

My feeling about that time was that it was happy. Gladys and Birt were lovely people who thoroughly enjoyed having two little ones around. The strange aunty who visited us was just an odd thing and I have no clear memory of that at all..apart from when she came to take us away.

That happened when I was five. She came. We were presumably all packed up and she popped us and our things in the car. On the drive away she said,’Don’t call me aunty Ruth anymore I’m your mother”..at least that’s how I remember it. I remember it like that and I remember being shocked but not knowing quite what to say.

One huge regret is that we, or mum, kept no contact details for Gladys and Birt. I am assuming they would be dead by now but they may not be but I don’t even know their surnames.

The lasting effect of this period in my life is that I expect people to leave me. In terms of my personally relationships it meant that I made sure it happened i.e. I either left them or I engineered it so they left me. At least once you realise the patterns you create in life you can stop doing them and I am glad to say I have. I, no doubt, have my vulnerabilities due to this start but don’t we all.

So there you go…the first bit of life as I remember it.

I was thinking that somewhere a long the line I should write some things that link up bits of my history. Mostly things come to me in random chunks and because they have been recalled due to a conversation, hearing something or seeing something…or indeed being somewhere.

Post the festival season, or at least the main part of it, there is a lot of admin to catch up on. This can involve a lot of sums as I do all the admin on the merchandising for all the bands I am in. This involves a lot of note taking as well as feeling like a money launderer from time to time because I come home with wads of cash that have to be attributed to the right bands, paid into the relevant accounts or handed over to individuals.

I commented on facebook recently that as a child I want from the top of the class in maths to the bottom and back again fairly regularly and that later in life I had worked out that this often had to do with whether I understood the point of the maths I was doing or not. When I do understand I actually quite like the magic of sums and enjoyed the statistics module I did as part of my degree and much later the Excel spread sheet course…love the formulas!

But all that took me back into a time in primary school. We were living in Halesowen in a  council Maisonette. Basically these were houses on top of houses as we had stairs and upstairs bedrooms but we had to go upstairs to get to our front door. We had a little balcony, black tiled floor with underfloor heating and a multi-storey opposite that people used to jump off from time to time when they’d had enough. Sadly I’m not joking. I don’t remember liking or loathing the place. I know we had no carpets on the stairs and there were a few  significant events that cemented the flat into my mind.

Although the flat was not cold because of the under floor heating and the fact we were on top of another maisonette we had a little three bar electric fire build into a fire place that someone had put together for mum, in the front room. Behind the bars was a chrome backing that stuck out at the top and bottom as it was curved. One day I managed to drop a playing card and it went down behind the Chrome at the top. My logical little brain said, ‘if you stick you hand under the bottom curve it should have dropped down and you should be able to fish it out’. The fire wasn’t on so this small person went ahead and stuck her hands down the bottom. BANG. I was flung from one end of the room to the other as, whilst the fire wasn’t on, the fire was switched on at the wall so the wires down the bottom were all live. I took the skin off all my knuckles and have a little scar on the end of one of my fingers that would make me instantly recognisable were I ever finger printed without having to compare the details of the curvy lines! I was terribly shocked of course and howled and that was not helped by my mother, obviously terrified that I could have killed myself, shouting at me. She did cuddle me relatively immediately afterwards once she’d checked out I was OK.

The reason the carpetless stairs stay in my mind is that when mum came and got us from our foster parents, a few years before, we went to live with her and her boyfriend, a guy who was an ex sailor. We’ll call him Bill. Unfortunately Bill had a sadistic nature which not only involved him slapping mum from time to time but also hitting us – with a big black ruler – and forcing us to stay seated at a table to eat stuff neither of us liked. With my sister one of those things was tinned peaches, she still hates them to this day, and with me it was boiled fish…yep, really boiled stinky fish. Quality cooking had not entered my life at that stage. Anyway mum wouldn’t have afforded to have us live with her without being with him but it became obvious that this couldn’t last and my mother still can’t talk about him and what it was like because it’s too painful. She is not always good at facing her demons. We had a spell of living with my grandmother, we moved to Cheltenham for one year and then we were living in this maisonette in Halesowen and Bill decided to visit. Not living anywhere near us at the time and being quite a while after they’d split up, this was quite a thing. I can’t remember if my sister was there or not but I know I refused to come downstairs and just sat on them, at the top, until he had gone. I don’t think I was punished for doing that as mum understood why even though it must have been hard trying to talk her way through that with a potentially violent ‘Bill’ in the front room.

I also remember poor mum being totally stressed out because my sister became very poorly while we were there. We were on a very tight budget but my sister and I knew things were pretty serious when mum bought Fi some Lucosade…not something we could have afforded. I just remember thinking that wasn’t fair but that she must have been ‘really ill’ and not truly understanding what was going on. It turned out she had some weird virus eating the bones near her brain and the medics were at a loss in terms of how to stop it. It did stop and my sister went on to become a forensic scientist..so no damage there!….

I remember quite liking my primary school but there were a couple of mathematics related instances that popped into my mind. I mentioned on facebook that I had Psychosomatic temperatures and sore throats. We obviously didn’t know they were psychosomatic initially but we had this lovely German doctor..Dr Schubert who said to mum…go and talk to the school. I don’t think she’s really ill but she’s upset about something and school may be the key. She was right. It could have been maths or the fact that my desk was near the back and I wasn’t doing well mostly because no-one had worked out my eye sight wan’t brilliant and I often couldn’t read things on the board. (We’re not even going to go into dyslexia and spelling tests here). But one thing that happened stayed with me all my life.

One day we were all in class waiting for the teacher to come in. We were typical energetic small people and being quite rowdy and to be quite frank we didn’t even really stop once she came in. Eventually she looked really cross and shouted at us. Then when we were really silent she said, ‘Ok then is there any body in here who doesn’t want to do maths?’…….and my hand shot up. Oooooooops. She really shouted at me and sent me from the room and I had to stay out until the end of the lesson when she would ‘deal’ with me.

I cried all the time I was waiting and by the time she got to me I was completely inconsolable. Bearing in mind I wasn’t very old, I’m guessing about 6 or 7, I had a fairly simplistic way of looking at the world. Mum had drummed into us that lying was really bad and I had taken that completely to heart…..so, when asked directly , ‘is there anyone here who doesn’t want to do maths?’ I stuck my hand up. I was, in my mind ,following unbreakable rules i.e. you don’t lie and I wasn’t being cheeky or trying to be funny but had given an instantaneous knee jerk reaction to the question. I took it literally. If you add into that the fact that in not lying  I had brought down a storm upon my head…I could not understand why and hence was inconsolable. So much so that I remember the teacher cuddling me later and trying to comfort me but she must have barely heard my explanation of why I’d put my hand up through all the sobs..”my mum”…..sob .sob sniff, sniff, sniff..hic… “do do don’t” …wah was wha…”do don’t lie”….etc etc ….things got that bad that the teacher became very upset and mum was called and had to come to school to explain why I was so upset and take me home.

Fortunately I was too young to feel embarrassed by the whole incident but tucked away inside me there is still an adverse reaction if anyone hints at saying they think I’ve told a lie…even a little white porky pie. That and anything like public humiliation ..the two here are obviously linked I guess…are the things that can upset me greatly. Beyond reason and rational.

Funny the things that stay with you.

My blog this week is delayed because it was Halsway Manor Summer school and summer schools are full on day time and evening….so it’s a two week gap this time. That will happen from time to time.

This was my second summer school this year as I was also invited to teach on the FolkWorks Adult summer school in July.

I have very fond memories of the first time I ever went to Folkworks. That time I was an invited tutor on the youth summer school. Someone from the Sage recently asked me for a quote about the youth summer school. The quote I gave was a result of the absolutely exhilarating exhaustion that came from tutoring highly energetic and motivated young people. I said, ‘ It’s like meeting a group of dementors. They suck everything out of you and still they want more ‘. It was fantastic. It doesn’t sound like a complimentary quote but it is meant to be…

In one of the evening concerts that year, which was mostly performances by participants, I remember volunteering to do a number. This was in addition to a number I did in the tutors concert. I chose to do an a capella version of ‘Bohemian Rapsody’. Well that made me a lot of friends I can tell you. They sang the whole thing with me, including the guitar solo and the following days there were little signs up around the college saying, ‘Jo Freya rocks’ and ‘Jo Freya’s cool’. I was surprised that a single that was released before most of them were born should be so well known in absolute detail and popular. I often sing the opening section in sound checks. It usually gets the sound crews attention!

One of the other performances I remember in that concert was Jamie Lambert, about 16 at the time, who sang a magnificent unaccompanied version of Amazing Grace. He went on to be a member of ‘Collabro’ – I think they won Britain’s got talent one year and they have been professional ever since.

First experiences like that can stick with you..first summer school, first Sidmouth etc You get progressively tired as the week goes on. At folk works you have your instrument group and then you have a band. That year I had band with song. Jamie Lambert and about 5 other strong young singers were all part of that group. They did a fantastic job of singing a Breton dance song in French and then took on a song I’d written a year or so before when working in Bahrain for the British council, alongside Mary Macmaster of the Poozies. While we were there we were taken on a trip out to the desert and there, in the middle of nowhere, was a tree and it was known as The Tree of Life. No one knew how long it had been there but that it was very very old and it had some how managed to survive against great odds. I found the title ‘Tree of Life’ and that story and the shear physicality of seeing it there inspiring. I wrote a song that night to be performed for Bahrain dignitaries and public the following day. It went down a storm and I have a vague memory that the fact I had done it made the local newspaper too. I’ve probably got a cutting somewhere.

I decided to teach an arrangement of it to my band with song. On the last day when we were rehearsing ready for a performance in the theatre in the evening David Oliver came in to have a listen. The sound of those young voices made him start to cry and I followed suit. I’m a complete sucker when men cry. I obviously view it as some kind of participation sport. I can’t help myself and it is particularly men crying I have to say. Two over tired adults and a set of poignant words were too much for us. I remember our ‘youth’ looking at us with very baffled expressions.

Chorus

“The Tree of life that gives us hope

and teaches us to learn to cope

Is standing there for all to see

The beauty of this ancient tree’  by Jo Freya – set to a Traditional arabic tune.

So that was my first summer school. I have done about 5 altogteher but the others have all been adult summer schools and, as you know already, I had a fabulous time this year too.

Halsway is something else. I think ‘the dream team’ as we became known was the brain child originally of the lovely Malcolm Mckinol who had a weekend workout in Durham and he booked myself, Kerry Fletcher, Stewart Hardy, Carolyn Robson, Karen Tweed and Kevin Dempsey as tutors. We, as the tutors, also loved this combination of people as it seemed very creative and we all fed off each other. We got invited to do a longer one…just like the ones we do now which are called a week but actually are three full days arriving the night before the first full day and leaving on the morning after the last day. It feels like a week but technically it isn’t. That first longer one was in Northamptonshire and for an organisation that none of us knew. It was not a happy partnership and we were not invited back or indeed wanted to return ….but the opportunity of doing it at Halsway came up. Brilliant. It is as much made by the venue and location as it is by the heady mix of tutors and participants. I love Halsway Manor can’t you tell?

We have learnt over the years now not to thrash our participants too hard. This still leaves some wanting more but on the whole leaves others satisfied with what they get without reaching total burn out. One of the things that makes this summer school different from all others is the large group ensemble where we put together a large group piece that features song, music and dance. It would be fair to say that not everyone likes this as it can feel chaotic when you are sorting things out and some people can be sat around doing nothing for short period of time. But it is unique as far as I am aware and it really brings everyone together in a shared creative experience so we keep doing it our way and adjusting as we go along to make sure enough time is spent on everything. We read all our feedback and incorporate what we can in to the program. Reading this years there is no doubt that we can’t fit in all the suggestions in even if we completely changed the program but people do give some very helpful suggestions for ways to improve the overall experience.

I forgot to say that over the years we lost Karen Tweed and Stewart Hardy and gained Paul Hutchinson and Sophie Ball. Our two past dream team members struggled with time and distance and lets face it…Halsway is a long way to go for many people. This year we had a particularly good age range of participants and a lot more people wanting specifically to dance. The other unique thing about the way we run things is people are encouraged to move between groups. You might start with fiddles but feel you want to go and sing or start dancing but want to play accordion. We had a cellist this year who spent most of her time with the accordions . Brilliant. Lots of complimentary accompaniment and counter melody going on.

I drove back from Halsway and it took 5.5. hours of tedious nose to tail driving. The following morning I drove to Glasgow which was five hours of none nose to tail driving and very easy by comparison.

The drive to Glasgow has included a lot of radio four listening which I have enjoyed as it makes me think. Perhaps I’ll share some of that with you next week.

Heather said in response to last weeks blog ‘Now we need to know if it all fell into place’…so here’s a little follow up.

One of the first things that is relevant to the report is to know the I am not a good sleeper. I mostly put it down to the time I was an au pair in France. The woman I worked for worked nights and her husband had a short temper. I was looking after two little boys Thomas, 5 and Tristan, 18 months. Tristan was probably the first individual I fell absolutely and totally in love with…well maybe not the first but it was a big one. Anyway. Tristan was hyperactive with a propensity for infections of the throat etc etc often running high temperatures. The mixture of the two meant he often woke in the night. His mum wasn’t there and his dad tended to ‘resolve’ the situation by shouting at him and smacking him. I couldn’t stand that. The result of this was that, despite him sleeping in another room, I became highly tuned to when his breathing changed which a) meant I knew when he was awake and b) I knew when he was going to cry. I’d leap up go and get him and take him to bed with me. This continued for a few months until he learnt to haul himself up and over the bars of his cot and then he’d come and find me. That stopped me having to get up at the very least but still involved him coooing at me, ‘tata’ (French term for aunty) and poking me up the nose, in my ears, giggling and generally being adoring but it didn’t involve much sleeping.  The result was a Jo who could no longer sleep as I wake with any noise and a pre condition to existing in a sleep deprived catatonic state on a regular basis. I tell you that because I feel I achieve quite a lot and if I was firing on all cylinders …well…I’d be, quite frankly, dangerous.

The point of telling you all that will become clear.

The plan was that I would go and rest at Chris and Kerry’s, in kent, after Broadstairs and Barry, my brother -in -law, would return home with my keys and go to the house to get my passport and deliver it to Andy to bring to me…and breath.

I got a phone call Monday morning to say he could find my euro purse but not my passport. I have a travel wallet and horror of horrors it wasn’t in there and yet I had a strong memory of having put it there. Barry searched every surface high and low with more and more frantic suggestions from a nearly hysterical Jo who was trying not to cry and to come to terms with the fact she was probably going to have to drive home 200 miles to look for it and either return having found it or at worse leave the band to go without me. Eventually after discussions Barry was back in the study. “What about on top of the printer” I said. Barry, showing true initiative lifted the lid of the printer and there was the passport in the scanner. The morning I was due to go to Sidmouth Paul had asked for copies of documents for the van hire for the Europe trip and, thinking we’d be tight on time if I waited unto after Broadstairs to do it, I did it in haste, just before leaving and…didn’t put it back where it lived. Found…hoorah and a text a few hours later from Andy to say he had it, with a photo of details so that I could check in for my return flight from Turin. Result, if a little stressful.

I passed a lovely couple of days, some time just working and one day when I drove to Gatwick to leave my car ready for my return from Italy and took a trip into London for lunch with a good friend.

The Wednesday night arrived. I went to bed relatively early and managed to go to sleep but woke at 2am.there I was twiddling my thumbs when I heard a car arrive at 2.50am. Dave – early. I rushed down to let him in but there were no keys in the door. Fortunately Andy, who’d arrived about 10pm, had heard him and came out with a key. I told Dave to lie on the sofa and went back to lie down but the others arrived a few minutes later. I gave up in the end, got up, got the last bit of packing together and off we went. We were early and they managed to get us on a slightly earlier crossing.

So after a very very short night we eventually arrived at the festival in France for about 5pm. I’d done a lot of the driving and was glad to stop. We had a couple of beers and then someone took us to our accommodation which was a large educational Gite about 10 minutes drive from the festival site…..that meant someone was going to have to drive each night. When we arrived at the gite we were told that the six guys were sharing and that I was in a room with two other women…..I didn’t know. I told them this was my worst nightmare and that I may be better off in the room with the men. We went upstairs to have a look.

The guys room had three beds on one side, three on the other and a tiny gap down the middle which meant had I moved in there everyone would have been falling over me in the night, there would have been little or no oxygen and I would have been screaming with claustrophobia in 5 seconds…and no sleep. The women’s room was tiny with a sloping roof with three beds close together and no room to swing a cat. I just said, non, non, non…and went and had a little weep on my own.

The thing is bearing in mind I don’t sleep well..any noise means I am awake and especially so if it’s people or sounds I don’t know. Additionally I occasionally snore and the idea of falling asleep around people I don’t know and keeping them awake means…I stay awake. Further more I am supposed to rest for my health’s sake. Everyone says I look well etc etc and I do but I have a compromised immune system due to my cancer and I have to do all in my power, within reason, to look after myself which means making my ability to rest as near to the best it can be for me..and finally our contract says Jo is to have a room on her own but I think festivals look at this and think..well that’s because all the rest are men, she’ll be fine with a bunch of other women..not. Anyway, they could see how upset I was and more so for having to explain my health and needs , which really aggravates me, in order not to appear like some diva with a tantrum….oh go on why not…I can’t possibly…how dare you…don’t you know who I ham!!!! ha ha

Oh and there were no towels so I had a shower and had to use a T-shirt to dry myself. The festival sorted that small problem too. (Italy accommodation where the other’s stayed had no towels either – note to self – always know where your towel is).

I checked the next day with our French agent about the accommodation and he says it is in the contract about a room on my own for me but they hadn’t actually returned the contract until a few days before we arrived. They probably hadn’t read that bit either.

They moved someone else from a room downstairs and I had a room to myself. My phone had no reception so no-one could disturb me and that night after the session they wanted us to be part of, I had a long rest.

The next morning everything looked better apart from some nutter who decided to drive up the main street as if he was on a race track between me and parked cars..scrapped all the way down the side of the van, ran out hurled abuse at me which..when I pointed out to him in French, he was driving too fast, I am driving with a right hand vehicle with less visibility than him and look what he’d done…he looked visibly shocked jumped in his car and drove off. No chance to get his number plate or anything. So that meant we would be paying for the damage on the hire vehicle. My legs were shaking from the event and poor Barnaby had a weeping Jo on his shoulder. Two lots of tears in less than twenty four hours. I am not a ‘cryer’ on the whole so that did not bode well and I remember saying to Barnaby, ‘I am not having a good time. I want to go home’. I was also angry that being the only woman driver it should happen to me. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have wanted it to happen to one of the others but the fact it was the only woman driver seemed like a slight. That’s me putting pressure on me to be as good as possible. Well it did happen and the band were brilliant acknowledging that there was nothing I could have done about it and it could have happened to anyone. We’re still waiting to know what the bill will be. I still feel bad about it.

After all that you may wonder how it all went. The gig was fantastic and I mean really bloody fantastic. We have had a summer full of packed crowds all over and the most brilliant responses to our music. This was one of those nights. A packed marquee who listened to an hours concert which they loved and then an hour and a half dance. The feel good factor was instantly restored. It really does make it all worth while when you get that reception. There were friends there and a good time was had by all. That was followed by another late night night and an early sound check in Italy – 4pm , the next day, despite the fact we weren’t due to be on until 11pm. That was hard. I can’t sleep in vans, planes or trains so I do not re-coup on route.

It’s amazing to think I dropped off to sleep back stage at about 10.15 and had a small snooze which meant I felt really sluggish as we went on stage. I remember jivying myself along saying , ‘come on, give it your all’. The crowd seem to love it although we struggled a bit with the sound on stage so whilst it was lovely to be in Italy, see many friends and do the gig it did not have the wow factor of the night before. It was lovely to be there and to see and here Anne-Lise Foy was a treat too. Her career started in my all Europeon women’s group, Freyja.

The rest of the travels you will be pleased to know went smoothly. Bed at my friend Anna’s by 4am, a lie in until 11.30 then a little car trip around her town. Lunch with her mum and sister with a lot of laughter. It was all utterly delightful and I wanted to kidnap her miniature mama as she was very cute. She chatted to me in Italian ….I nodded and smiled ..but understood on little bits. Anna then took me to the airport and despite the flight being delayed by half an hour and the M25 being a car park as usual my journey was only really about 5.5 hours. The guys were on the road for 18.5 hours partly because their ferry was delayed too. It was the right, if expensive, decision for me.

I am resting more than I would normally just now as I have two festivals this weekend and then I go straight into another summer school. No complications with travel for this one except it involves me driving me…..It’s a week away..again. Do I love what I do?

Yes. Very much and it is absolutely what keeps me alive but I do have to factor in recovery time and I am, believe it or not, getting better at that.

Sometimes the travelling can all get a bit too much.

In the early days of my life in Blowzabella we seemed to be travelling every five minutes and leaving the country every ten minutes. In those days you had to travel with enough cash in enough denominations to get you across Europe and a carnet document listing what you had in the van. Technically customs could insist on you taking everything out either on leaving or returning to check the carnet was accurate and mostly to check you weren’t illegally exporting eg taking a lot of instruments to sell or importing for the same reason. All to do with tax dodging. It could make those moments unpleasant even though you knew they were only doing their jobs.

Some of those things may yet return.

This summer things have gone a little pear shaped due to the amount we’re doing. As it’s Blowzabella’s 40th celebration we are doing tons of festivals here and abroad, other gigs etc. In days of yore Paul James took on the roll of pretty much doing everything except the money and merch which I did. He was a full time musician at that time and therefore meant he had some time to devote to the minutiae of travel arrangements and the like. Now he has a full time job but still does most of the admin for the band…at least until next year. The reality of this is ideally over this year we could have done with someone else being the ‘tour manager’ to keep their eye on trips that needed booking, channel tunnel, flights or what ever. This is in no way a criticism of Paul as he has miraculous kept things afloat, admin wise, pretty much single handedly over years despite working full time. It’s more by way of saying – none of us have had the time or energy to keep that side of things in focus.

If you play in other bands like many of us do this ‘celebratory year’ is in addition to all the other things we do, other bands, workshop weekends, rehearsals etc….I.e. much the same as having a full time job although often longer hours to most normal jobs especially when you factor travel into the equation which takes hours and hours of your time. Most of us have barely had the time to turn our suitcases around before heading off again. This can also mean emails don’t get answered etc. You end up skimming through them trying to work out what has to be dealt with now and what might be able to wait. If, as in my case, you factor in border line dyslexia it takes me a long time to process written things properly and I can often get the complete opposite of a meaning if I haven’t had a chance to read it more than once or digest it properly.

So all in all none of us have been able to keep an eye on things in the future but just about coping with focussing on what’s happening next week…or in the next ten days.

Then when you realise certain things are about to happen the reality can come crashing in on you.

This week we are off to France and Italy due to arrive in France Thursday evening, join a session, play on the Friday and then leave for Italy to a gig that’s five hours further south. Because of the band going from one country to another and particularly because of where the French festival is, Anost, it just isn’t possible to fly so it’s a band and van situation. It’s basically 6 hours from Calais to Anost, without stopping. You have to get to Calais first of course. Then on the Saturday Aosta is 4.35 hours further South and again that’s a google maps calculation and does not involve stopping.

The plan is to travel all the way back from Italy on the Sunday. Well that’s a minimum of 8 1/2 HRs without stopping to Calais, then a crossing and then another 4.5 hours the UK side as we have to collect the relevant cars and then drive on etc…..I hope you’re following all this!

That means the return journey home will be somewhere between 14 and 16 hours in one day most of which will be travelling in a van and then a car apart from meal, wee and coffee stops….as few as possible….oh and driver change overs on the van.

Well I looked at this and particularly the 830 miles from Aosta to Car Colston, where I live, and panicked.

The thing is that, as many of you know, I was diagnosed five years ago with an incurable but highly treatable cancer called Follicular Lymphoma. The really dangerous bit, a grade four tumour which occurred as the Follicular lymphoma morphed in my groin into large B Cell diffuse lymphoma, was dealt with very efficiently at the time. I’m not going to go into the details now. However living with something you know is incurable, especially one that relates to the ‘C’ word takes a little getting used to. Mostly I survive with a subconscious awareness that involves me cracking on with life at quite a fast pace and enjoying every minute for what I can squeeze out of it. Within that I am told by my specialist that I am supposed to look after myself and get plenty of rest. I view ‘living’ and the joy of music, laughter, and good pals as the right choice as, within reason, they make life very enjoyable and I am sure the happiness generated by that actually contributes to my well being. The ‘getting plenty of rest’ is a mute point that I do pay attention to but don’t focus constantly on.

I have arrived at a more comfortable way of living alongside my cancer, mostly ignoring it and not letting it define me.

So when I looked at this trip instead of the dreaded disease being in my subconscious and being something that I live along side of instead of defining me it thrusts it out into the open and pushes it right in front of my face and says……you can’t do this. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T DO THIS. I’M YOUNG AND I CAN DO ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING!…..well not really. It just isn’t a good idea. Not only is it the toll it will take on my body but my recovery time is longer and there’s still a lot of summer to get through. So the first thing that upset me was the subconscious reality being thrust well and truly into the open and forcing me to focus on it.

I looked at all that and thought…hmmm… what can I do to help myself here. Aosta is not that far from Turin. I could fly back from Turin on the Sunday, hop a train to Newark and go home then drive the next day to Andy’s and collect my instruments and merchandise etc etc….This idea tinkered away in the background but I couldn’t quite decide to do it. Why? Because I felt guilty. Obviously everyone couldn’t fly back because the van would have to get home somehow and the instruments, merch etc. It makes you feel like a selfish diva although what it actuallly is is self-centred in the positive meaning I.e. I need to do this for me. But I procrastinated a lot. I contacted a dear friend of the band’s in Italy, Anna Faudone, to see about the possibilities of getting to the airport in Turin were as I knew she lived in the area and was also hoping to come to the festival. No problem she said…..the kindness of others often makes me weep! I checked flights and there was an afternoon flight to Gatwick….do I do it…do I not….

Part of the guilt is that I tend to be one of only three-four names drivers in the band. If it ended up being only three then there would be only two of them to drive all the way back.

Eventually I bit the bullet and booked. Whilst it didn’t make me feel any less guilty or selfish the decision at least made me feel better.

At Broadstairs Folk Week things took another turn that would effect all of the above.

When we leave via the Chanel Tunnel Andy usually comes and picks me up the night before, he drives me to Kent and we stay with our lovely pals Chris and Kerry. Paul arrives the next morning with the van and anyone who has already met up with him etc. This is because we all live in very different parts of the country….and one in France of course. Well two things happened. Firstly, due to none of us really being able to think about this in advance Paul couldn’t get us a ‘chunnel’ crossing and had to go for a boat. Because of the amount of time needed driving the other side and our designated arrival time in Anost being 5pm Thursday, it had to be a very early boat. Jon then said from his experience the security checks for the boats were taking longer and longer and we needed to factor even more time in. So Paul is collecting us from Chris and Kerry’s at 4am on Thursday morning (or Weds night depending on how you look at it,). The next thing that happened was Andy realised he wasn’t travelling from home but from a Leveret rehearsal in the Cotswolds so could drive me to Kent.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…….

So there I was in Broadstairs, due to leave on the Monday morning to drive to Nottinghamshire. Then I would have had to turn round and drive back again on the Wednesday meaning my car would be in Kent. On the Sunday I was looking at flying in to Gatwick (already booked now), getting a train into London, going across London, getting a train into Kent and still having 200miles to drive home. Also turns out that neither Chris nor Kerry were going to be home Sunday night so getting from a rural Kent station to their house was also going to be complicated and not stress free.

At this point you’ve probably either lost the will to live or arrived at the conclusion that I should stay in Kent….but I had to go home because…oh yes….my passport was in Nottinghamshire. No choice …or was there?

I thought about this and discussed this with various people. No-one at home to courier the passport down to Kent etc etc.

But there had to be a way! At Broadstairs not only was I playing with Blowzabella but I was also playing with Narthen. This meant it was a busy and utterly exhausting weekend on top of a nightmare 8 hour drive over from Sidmouth. Narthen happens to include my sister and brother-in-law and my brother in law is now retired from his day job. My sister said, if you ask him nicely, he could go over with your house Keys (only an hours drive each way!!) collect your passport and deliver it to Andy who had to go home anyway. That way after his Leveret rehearsal he could bring it to me when he came to stop at Chris and Kerry’s rendezvous point tonight (Weds). After some wakeful hours on the Saturday night at Broadstairs that is what I decided to do.

I gave my house key to Barry after the Narthen vocal workshop on Sunday morning, they left and I then did the Blowzabella Dance workshop and dance in the evening . I decide to leave that night for Chris and Kerry’s as the dance finished at 9 and they were only an hour away. Barry said he would go to my house between 9am and 10am and would ring me to let me know everything was ok.

Monday morning arrived and Barry rang to say that he had found my Sanef toll thing, my euro purse (don’t ask) but no passport. I was very very close to tears at that point as it meant I would have to drive the 200miles home to look for it and then 200miles back again. He said look…I’m not in a hurry let me carry on looking.

I have a travel file and that’s where my passport lives. It only doesn’t live there when it’s with me or on those occasions when I have been too busy or distracted to put it in it’s allotted place. I was totally flummoxed as I had a certainty that I had put it in my file after my last trip abroad.

We/he found it in the end in my scanner. Just before leaving for Sidmouth Paul had asked for copies of various documents so that we could sort out the drivers for the van. I knew there would be little or no time on return from Broadstairs to do this and they might need time to process it so I thought…better do it before I leave….but not quite having the time and brain power to remember to take it out from under the printer lid and pop it back where it lives…I’d arranged to pick up Mum on the way to Sidmouth so I had to leave and I did so completely forgetting about the passport.

Barry having ransacked every surface in the house and was back in my office and at his wits end when, just as I said, ‘it isn,t on top of the printer is it? He had the good sense to look under the lid. Thank god for brother in laws.

My separate travels cost me – not the band , and therefore I will almost certainly end up with less than I earn. That being the situation I thought right, while I have a day off and am relatively unpressured now I’ll deliver my car to Gatwick, short stay car park so that when I fly in Sunday I can just get in the car and go home. I won’t have driven before that on that day. Anna is going to feed me a lovely pasta lunch in Italy and take me to the airport and I should still be home before Andy is with all my gear. Just the collection to do on Monday after, I hope, he has had a lie in.

I expect you all feel tired now. I do…but then I’m still recovering from the fabulous summer gigs I’ve been doing so far.

Here I am at Sidmouth and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my performances with Narthen and Blowzabella and now I am on compering duties until I leave.

This reminded me of something that happened once on a previous occasion quite a few years ago and as usual is so ridiculous you know I can’t be making it up.

I was down to compère in the Ham. I can’t at this point remember who was on that night or exactly what year it was. Well….it is Wednesday of Sidmouth week. I am surprised I can remember anything at all. The job was completed, the concert had gone well and I’d managed to blag a lift, for myself and a friend, to the ‘Late Night Extra’ which was the late evening dance up at the Bowd marquee quite a way up the hill above Sidmouth.

It wasn’t until we’d actually got there that I realised I’d left my handbag back stage at the Ham and it had my ticket in it. I went up to the stewards who found someone with a walkie talkie who spoke to someone who said, ‘it’ll have been taken to the office by now , for safety, and she’ll be able to collect it tomorrow’. They also said, ‘it’s Jo Freya so let her in’. Sometimes having some notoriety is useful. So that was great we relaxed and had a fun filled couple of hours and managed to sort a lift back down. We needed to get back into the main part of Sidmouth as our accommodation was a self catering flat above the antiques shop right in the middle of Sidmouth. We probably got out of the car at about 1.45 am.

It was only as we were walking to our quarters that I realised not only had my ticket been in my bag but the key to get into the flat was also in the bag. We wandered round to see if any lights were on in the hopes that someone would let us in but there were none. Being a flat above a shop, knocking on the door was not very audible upstairs but we tried that too……no joy.

There was a wheely bin outside so the next thing we tried was one of us holding the bin steady while the other one climbed on top of it in an attempt to reach a first floor window to see if we could push it open or knock on it. No joy. Neither of us were tall enough to even reach the window sill.

We discussed what on Earth we were going to do….we’d even tried shouting ‘Tony’ very loudly as we were sharing the flat with the late and lovely Tony Rose. All to no avail.

Suddenly I had a brain wave. I said to my pal….,’you know what I am sure I’ve seen ladders at the back of the Ham marquee. We could borrow one and see if we can get in through that window. I’m sure it would reach’. So off we trotted at about 2.30am. In those days some of the sound engineer crew used to sleep in the Ham in order to be on site for the sound checks that started in the morning the next day. So we crept into the back of the Ham and tried to lift this sliding ladder thing quietly. It was one of those where one half slides down to make it easier to manage and so that you could extend it to what ever height you needed. I think the sound engineers had had a jolly good wind down too and, despite a massive amount of swearing, giggling and clunking from us, weren’t hearing anything or feeling any pain. The snoring never ceased for one second.

So there we were, two women both ironically wearing those long sleeved Breton stripy T’shirts, carting a ladder between us through the streets of Sidmouth looking very much like we might be up to no good. We got to the shop got the ladder to extend to just below the first floor window and up my companion goes to knock on the window or try and get it open and I held the bottom to make sure it didn’t wobble. At which point and with impeccable timing a police car arrived and two police officers got out…………Ooops!

I went straight into a speel along the lines of, ‘good evening officer. This isn’t what it looks like…….(gulp)…I am a compère working for the festival and I unfortunately left my handbag where I was working and it’s now locked in an office with my key in it….blah di blah di blah…’ At which point the upstairs window opens and Tony Rose popped his head out. ‘Do you know these women sir’ one officer asked, ‘no I’ve never met them in my life before’ quipped Tony..much to our alarm . Oh how we laughed…not!…and then he did confess to knowing us and came down to let us in. We had to leave the door on the latch and carry the ladder back of course and the whole thing was like some strange keystone cop farce with us dressed as the burglars . Certainly not something you’re likely to forget and nearly resulted in the headline that is the title of the blog.

Thank you Tony for your perfect and very funny quip , for having been part of this ridiculous saga and for showing no anger at being woken at 3am Though he’s no longer with us this memory of him is always with me and his music also makes sure he is not forgotten.

One of the wonderful things about growing older is that I care less and less what people think of me. This comes from two areas of my brain. One is the bit that has recognised I am basically a good person who doesn’t intentionally offend someone ….unless I intend to offend them!..rare but does happen usually to people being very horrible or totally insensitive. The other is…I arrived at a point where the child in me, who had made me ingratiate myself to people even if I didn’t like them, in a bid to be liked and loved, no longer dominates my way of relating to the world.

I don’t have to be liked and loved by everybody…obvious really. The shaky start in life that comes from being fostered for four years as a baby has given way to that lovely feeling of being loved by my friends and family. I don’t need to add to that although occasionally it happens due to a rare new friend popping into your life. How ridiculous that I seriously used to go out of my way to get people to like me who I really didn’t like. I analyse each new encounter still and recognise that I am polite to some very rude people but often that is about business more than anything else….as explained above..push me too far and I won’t hold back. But mostly I will.

The reason for that preamble is that I am thinking about ‘party’ times and how as a much younger person  many of us will have woken the next day after over indulging and groaned, not just because of the headache but because of a vague blurred memory of having done something you shouldn’t have done or embarrassed ourselves terribly. Drink is a dangerous drug for loosening your inhibitions as we all know. Or I hope we do!

An example I’m not proud of happened at The Gabriel’s one time. I was friends with, and actually had a huge crush on Siobhan Gabriel daughter of Mike and Jaquey Gabriel two stunning singers on the Cheltenham folk scene. Siobhan was about a year or so older than me, drop dead gorgeous and had a fab voice too. I wanted to be her. I was probably about 15 and Mike and Jaquey were away but Kieron and Eamonn were there, the sons, and Siobhan of course. They decided to have a party. At that point we were still experimenting with drink. I remember saying to someone at Folkworks last week that we sometimes drank lager and blackcurrant in pubs when we were under age in the hopes that it didn’t look like alcohol should the police come in. Naieve or what! I also remember sampling rum and Black which was so disgustingly sweet there’s no way I’d drink it now along with my mothers favourite drink at the time Cinzano Bianco…Yuck….sugar in a glass. Aemon had a bottle of whisky. VAT 69. I have no idea if that existed or not but that’s what I remember . Then comes the embarrassing part which I’ll gloss over quickly….I passed out in the loo having at least managed to sit on it first..so yes…trousers round ankles etc etc I was found as I hadn’t managed to lock the door. My modesty was returned and someone put me to bed! (Due to the wonderful thing that is facebook I have just found out from Siobhan that she put me to bed…I don’t know whether I’m pleased or embarrassed that she remembers ha ha. Please actually. Sign of a good friend) I remember absolutely nothing about the evening other than that. The ridiculous thing the next morning was I woke quite early….. I am a bad sleeper anyway and alcohol just makes it worse….and I decided to walk home. I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror and the thought that went through my brain – I remember it so vividly – was – god you look beautiful this morning!!!!!!! Obviously crushed clothes and blood shot eyes were a new form of beauty but what a weird thing to think…obviously my brain was still addled.

Anyway, I got home but I had to rest on a bench on the way and, as with all youth, I recovered disgustingly quickly. That experience made me very wary of getting ‘blue blazing blind drunk’ (spot the folk song quote) and also pretty much put me off whisky and spirits for life. If I ever touch whisky its good quality and I might have one but I rarely choose it. I like the occasional GnT and Aperol or campari spritz…again in small quantities. So, a lesson well learnt I hear you say. I have no doubt some of you will have had those ‘groan’ experiences and some may be a lot worse than mine.

In my more mature years it doesn’t mean I don’t get off my trolly from time to time but I am always amongst friends and never to the point where I can’t remember what has been done. This means, ironically, that I have very happy times where I have over imbibed and the rest of the time I go for sensible quantities in relation to my capacity and …..’usually’……stop. I also have a lot of time when I drink nothing at all.

I became conscious of the potential demon of drink on becoming first a semi professional and then professional musician. I saw quickly those who drank before, during and after gigs and rarely made a life long career of music because of it. Most professions do not involve you spending your working life in licensed premises so I swore, quite early on, that I would not become a slave to drink and certainly never be one of those who couldn’t get on stage unless they had had one. Always seemed like a rocky road to me. I’m still here to tell the tale so I must have got something right.

However one of my favourite over indulging memories was at Sidmouth about four years ago. The previous year I had had the diagnosis of a grade four tumour I had been through chemo etc etc…and I had lived. I also drank no alcohol for nearly a year. Along comes a night off at Sidmouth and I was staying with a delightful lady who I have been with every year since when I have been there. She likes gin as does my sister, who was also there, so I think we had two..then wine with dinner. Well I was already gone by then but we all decided we were going to go off to the step dance competition. I was supplied with a drink on arrival..can’t remember what it was ….who cares ha ha… and watched the proceedings through very bleary eyes. I loved it. I really loved it. It was joyous the music was happy and all was well with the world and I was happy and to some degree celebrating my survival. I loved it so much that I decided to join in. May I say at this point that this was not, as far as I am aware aware, an audience participation event. Also, I had never done step dancing in my life before but obviously thought I could and that I should. Up I leapt and capered about with great gusto and all I remember is a lot of smiling faces. My sister was watching out for me and got me home in one piece…well nearly. I slightly missed the door jam due to my top half travelling faster than my legs underneath and shouldered the wood with all my weight and momentum behind me and had a very large bruise the next day to prove it.

I did apologise to a few people the next day and basically got the same response…that I had been very funny and that I was the most delightful drunk!! Lucky me eh! Not the maudlin argumentative type happily. I view that as a post trauma euphoric celebration story that still makes me smile and I am happy to say many of those who witnessed it smile too.

So why did all that pop up. Well Folkworks of course, We had a delightful age range of tutors from 25 to 68…I am somewhere in between but was definitely the matriarch. There was such a lovely buzz this year that being in the bar and sessions at the end of the day was a pure pleasure. Participants like to see the tutors involved in the sessions but most previous times did not have that element of exuberance and joy that this one did. It was an absolute pleasure extending your tutorial duties in this way. Most nights I drank beer as it’s weak and the quantity quenches your thirst to a certain extent and I can’t drink loads of it because of the amount of fluid involved. It’s practical in case ‘party Jo’ decides to lose her off switch and imbibe too much. Never a good idea when you are teaching as you have to get up and teach the next day even if your participants are incapable of learning….I mean post too much in the bar for them too!

I had the most fab times. Very short on sleep but lots of inspiring joyous music and song and a clear head to do my job the next day…if a little light on sleep working on 5-6 hours a night. I always aimed to leave the sessions by midnight at the latest as it can still take me two hours to wind down and go to sleep. It was always gone midnight but not by much generally. This one night, just as I was about to leave at about midnight, I was offered a jaeger bomb and, sensibly in my mind, turned it down. Nancy remembered having one…turns out it was three…and I felt nice and smug the next day. The night after our youngest tutor Greg said…I really want to see you drink a Jägar Bomb. Well I’m a sucker for pleading eyes…pleading…not bleeding…and said Ok. It was Jägermeister with red bull. They sort of banged it on the table like a Harvey Wall Banger and then downed it in one. I followed suit and my immediate reaction was an almighty burp which took me and everyone else by surprise. It resulted in us all howling with laughter . My excuse….Jägermeister is a digestive made with herbs etc etc. Well my digestion was full of Folkworks …’Oh I can’t be eating again can I..three meals a day’  and beer and obviously needed sorting out. It had done it’s job. I even had a second. We laughed. Told stores and anecdotes, sang and then did all that again and continuously howled with laughter. By that part of the week I was so tired and we were having such a hoot in the bar that I couldn’t drag myself away until 2.30 so the red bull did not keep me awake hoorah…and I didn’t have my customary hour and a half staring at the ceiling. I just lay down and jerked awake when the alarm went off.

So there we are. In many ways I feel like this particular post should come with a health warning but you now what….I don’t encourage, condone or condemn …just have fun but look after yourselves and others.

Some of you will be aware that I have just been on holiday. I had a week in Crete in a very nice hotel on a holiday that consisted of very little other than swimming, reading, sleeping and eating nice food. Absolutely just what I needed in order to get me rested after a very busy time and to put me in good stead for teaching on Folkworks where I am now. The only thing that went wrong was the on set of some heat rash, pretty much everywhere, which I have ‘t had for years. I use a special sun cream for sensitive, allergic skin and for decades now it has removed that problem but this year……not so lucky.

It did get me thinking about holidays and what you remember about them and, like many things in life, it is often the things that go wrong that stick in your mind rather than those blissful moments where the holiday has gone swimmingly well but nothing has stuck in your memory other than…’it was lovely’.

This one wasn’t all plane sailing. We’d booked a private taxi to take us to Gatwick to save frying on the underground in London. He was half an hour late which ate into all our contingency time meaning we only arrived with ‘enough time’ instead of ‘plenty of time. He also took a route that neither of us recognised and had us constantly thinking that we weren’t actually getting any nearer. Then in Crete our hotel had booked us a transfer to the airport and he got a flat tyre on the way.

I mentioned this previously on Facebook as the funny side of that was he tried to crank the car up, with both of us inside, in order to try changing the tyre. I think his thinking was that having a flat tyre and making his passengers late was already too much without frying them at the side of the road but he hadn’t factored in the combined weight of two people who’d done little other than eat or swim for a week. As I said then…he would have needed an elephant hoist to lift the car not a small crank. Anyway, it wasn’t possible as you can imagine and they sent a replacement taxi. We just made it…again. I suppose it made bookend stories of the holiday and had a certain poetry about it if rather stressful poetry.

One holiday that has always stuck in my mind was one we’d booked in Tuscany. We both love Italy ….the countryside, food, wine etc so we thought a week in Tuscany would be fab. We’d booked a self catering house via the internet and it was in a tiny little village about an hour and a half from the airport along loads of windy roads. When we finally arrived at our destination we wanted to get into the house and out for a meal before the restaurants closed. We found the house but could find no key and no message . After quite a lot of feeling stressed, checking documentation etc etc I took a walk down the hill to what looked like a little farm stead and sure enough the key was essentially sorted with the people there. Apparently they had no idea when we were going to turn up and we had no contact details to let them know!

We didn’t really even look round once we had the key but pretty much dumped our bags and went off and found one of the two little taverna’s in the village. We shared a bottle of wine over a nice meal and all in all things were looking and feeling a lot better.

Once back at the house we soon realised that heat was an issue. It was a very old house with thick walls but it was still boiling and there was no air conditioning. The house had bedrooms on the first floor which all felt oppressively hot and no air going through and then a large attic space with windows on all sides that had air flowing through it. That was the only logical choice of place to sleep and so we headed up the last flight of stairs to the airy attic beyond.

I was in front and my companion was behind. As we started to emerge into the room a voice behind me said, ‘there’s a scorpion on the wall and you’re going to have to kill it!’ Sure enough there, quite high up in the wall was a scorpion about two inches long. I have never seen one in Western Europe before or since actually. So there I was at about midnight standing on a chair with a shoe in my hand thinking …I’m only going to get one bash at this and I don’t want to miss otherwise it might be scurrying around the floor all night. I’m sad to say that I achieved my aim and sent the beast off to scorpion heaven .

It was only after the holiday I was left wondering why I had accepted the role of scorpion slayer without question!

If you’re like me and have had a problem with an insect…or several insects it does make you rather sensitised to it. To such an extent that we kept feeling that something was crawling around the bed under the sheets. Sleep was not coming easily. This happened for long enough that eventually we turned the bedside light on and whipped the sheet back and sure enough there was a black beatle in the bed. That got thrown out rather than squashed and later on the same thing happened again….Alexander beetle number two. That was not the best nights sleep of the holiday.

After that things improved with some wonderful sallies out into Sienna and surrounding villages. I remember seeing the incredible marble floor depiction of the ‘massacre of the innocents’ in the cathedral and the amazing sloping arena type square where apparently they do horse racing.

On the Tuesday night we headed off sleepily to bed when the local disco started. Somewhere in a village near by music blasted out until 1am and was bouncing round the Tuscan hills and seemingly taking on volume with each reverberation. It was an irritation that meant that sleep again was long in arriving.

Hot and sticky the next day and a little disgruntled we were about to go out when my companions back went. One of those excruciating things where you can barely move. Sitting hurts as does standing or lying down and trying to do anything between those postures was excruciating . Dosed up with painkillers and moving very slowly we had an ‘ok day’ under the circumstances but ate in for simplicity and an early night.

The back had eased a bit the following day and so that evening we decided to eat out again but in the other taverna this time. We had a very pleasant meal and I seem to remember eating pizza that had marinated artichokes on it. That night all seemed well until I got an overwhelming urge to projectile vomit. Fortunately I made it to the bathroom but spent pretty much the whole of the night there one way or another.

Our final day I was feeling better but very tired but my companions back went again! There we were – myself recovering from what was presumably a small bout of food poisoning, a companion in agony and …..yes, you may have guessed this was going to happen….up starts the second disco of the week only being a Friday it went on much longer. Last thing I remember was the irony of us both lying there singing, ‘sweet dreams are made of this’ as we’d kind of given up being irritated as we were going to have to see it out one way or another.

Due to the back problem and not knowing if my companion was going to be able to do the trip to the airport in one go we had decided to give ourselves the extra hour and leave very early….after little sleep. It’s like a chorus now that phrase isn’t it. I lugged two very heavy suitcases down to flights of stairs to the hire car, crow barred the afflicted into the passenger seat and off we went. It turned out we didn’t need to stop after all and so spent an incredible amount of time trying to remain comfortable..ish in a very uncomfortable airport.

How could so much that could go wrong go so wrong in one week? Not surprising that we’ve never forgotten it. A year or so alter for one reason or another we did an analysis of holidays in hotels verses holidays in self catering and much to our surprise hotels came out on top. We’d assumed the ability to not be disturbed I.e. sleep,as long as you want and eat in occasionally etc would outweigh the hotel stuff but it didn’t prove to be true for us. It’s been almost exclusively hotels ever since.