Number Seventy News

Sometimes it seems like everyone in Shetland plays the fiddle and composes tunes for it. Jenna Reid is certainly in that mould - two really good sets with a good variety of tunes: her own, tunes by other Shetland folk, and tunes from further afield. Unlike some bands, there were almost equal numbers of slow tunes and fast ones - some of the slow ones quite lovely. The band included her sister on keyboard and 2nd fiddle, a guitarist and a bass player. But I find I don’t like unadulterated fiddle tunes - I’m a words man really.

The upper room of the Black Swan, on Peasholme Green, York, is a great venue - intimate, wood panelled, floor not quite level, chairs verging on the challenging, heating options of cold or hot - but made up for by the absolutley fabulous acts that the Black Swan Folk Club puts on there. And there’s an excellent range of beers in the equally pleasant but less eccentrically heated bar downstairs.

This Thursday  the guest was Roy Bailey, who has been singing on the road for 50 years now.  What a treat ! What a range of delightful anecdote, exceeded only by the range of moving, amusing, tuneful songs.  He had the audience singing the chorus of almost every one, loudly, or softly as in the beautiful “Beeswing”.  He did several of his songs for children, including “Skin”, and one in which he had us all signing (sic) the words - pointing out that kids find signing a lot easier than grown-ups, who tend to flap their hands about quite randomly.  Best of all, though, his social/political songs - he’s that rare and lovely thing nowadays, a true socialist, and the hatred of war and concern for equality and justice just makes one grateful for people like him.  Not all his own songs, Tom Paxton, Richard Thompson, Pete Seeger among the writers or collectors.  Oh, and a healthy contempt for New Labour.

Back in York, we have been having the York Literary Festival, which is definitely not a festival anything like Edinburgh, though I understand some Edinburgh Fringe events also get audience numbers in the negative if you discount grandparents, WAGS. Highlight of that sort was the Exhibition pub open mic on tour - first to York Central Library at 9.30 am on Saturday, where we had perhaps 7 poets and an audience of 4, beaten only by attendance at the Acomb Learning Centre (aka Acomb Library) on Monday night where we had 7 poets and no audience at all.

In case we should have thought that this was the audience for poetry in York, it was encouraging /depresssing to note that Carol Ann Duffy filled the Lyons Concert Hall to bursting on Thursday night and that half of the audience were undergraduates ! Many of whom laughed in the right places. C.A.D. was great, though she didn’t read anything very new - excerpts from the Laughter of Stafford Girls High (?) and some from the Worlds Wife and Rapture. An excellent hours worth. And she reads professionally and well - with some well practised pauses and sharp glances to point up some particularly waspish observation.

Normality was restored on Monday night at the Black Swan, where some mostly drab and mediocre performances (some of them by people who can be sparkling) attracted a spiffing audience of 10. (I was audience for this one, not performer). Mind you, they did have competition from the York Pagan Society meeting downstairs. Someone, not a pagan, was the second personin 48 hours to recommend I listen to early Bjork - must be something in the air.

I did go to a very interesting talk(not part of the literary festival) at the Railway Museum by Christian Wolmar, who wrote the excellent history of railways in Britain which I was given and had recently read. His main thesis is that it’s mostly governments that have screwed up the railways, never more so than currently, and he loathes the effects of privatisation as much as I do. He doesn’t think there was ever a golden age of railways, but that the final years of British Rail came pretty near it - I tend to agree.

[ I understand that many York Literary Festival events have been excellent - but Sean O'Brien's dictum about poets and poetry is borne out again - unless you're C.A.D.].

Just a plug - a delightful small gallery, beautifully designed, that has really interesting exhibitions. Current one is Breughel to Rubens. Lots of excellent pictures, with Breughel’s “Massacre of the Innocents” the star. It appears at first sight to have rather few innocents being put down, but, as the informative caption revealed, if you look a bit closer you can see that the goat, and the sack and various other objects people are holding or sticking swords into used to be infants before they were painted over.  I’m not sure of the date or motive of the squeamish souls who did that.  And don’t miss the handles on the gallery entrance door - best ever.

The cafe does an excellent BLT - the shop doesn’t have anything any sane person would want to buy.

In spite of the man who gutted the garden and cleaned out the pond saying “There’s no fish in there, mate,” there are !!!

Three of the wee boggers. They obviously gave him the slip.  Whether they will survive in the now pretty sterile pond is anyone’s guess, of course.

Birghter than you think, fish.  (See national news).