I had a lovely day at the Sidmouth Folk Festival. I went there by bus, which was a first for me, probably a good thing to do once! Met up with Justin on the seafront with very little difficulty and we both admired each others hair, he’s had his all cut off! He looks very dashing of course, but had a rather sunburnt neck.
Spent the day joining in with the festival as a tourist, the Sidmouth I know and love was replaced with a heaving crowd of morris dancers, street vendors, entertainers and every pub is packed full of fevered musicians strumming and plucking, squeezing and blowing in sessions, only disrupted by the occasional slightly irritating person daring to join in vocally and keep them from making their respective sounds for the length of a folk song (and those babies are LONG!) People-watching from the middle of a pub session was great fun, I enjoyed watching the concentration and cameraderie, along with the various eccentric outfits. I did rather long for an instrument, but don’t feel any of mine are up to scratch…maybe if I go to sessions for the next ten years and sit there quietly some of the tunes will start coming out of my fingers when I play my sax or flute.
We went along to a Gregorian chant workshop, which was actually great as the chap running it (I’ll endeavour to find out his name) taught us to read dot notation. He also reminded us of the Gregorian modes, which surfaced from the depths of my memory from GCSE music, so I obviously did learn something then! It was quite hard combining sight reading in two new languages (dot notation and Latin, as I’ve never done any Latin) but I think I did pretty well. The really tough bit was choosing an octave, as I’m not naturally Gregorian monk pitch, but there were a few sopranos there and I think we made rather a good sound, if not the traditional plainsong pitch.
In the evening we went to the global dance party, with ‘What Weasel’ playing (I can’t find them online, so I may have the name wrong). They were brilliant, entirely instrumental and very bouncy and fun, definitely appealed to everyone. I ended up bouncing up and down for the solid two and a half hour set, quite literally dancing until my feet bled (eww, I know)!
Also spent most of the day putting the world to rights with Justin, which was cathartic, and talking about all our mutual friends, which made me feel less out of things. I feel much more positive and tied to the moment than I did, I have spent the last few months really living for the next big thing, but I think I need to stop doing that as it’s not a very happy outlook. So, in the spirit of living for the moment, I’m going to make sure fun is top of my list for the next few months!
