shewhomust | Winter Solstice: Fire, Frost and Nineweaving

The unexpected treat of the winter was an e-mail from

durham_rambler and I might by any chance be planning to go to the Waterson:Carthy concert at the Sage? We might indeed: and if we hadn't already been considering it, this would have been enough to start us doing so. With the result that on Thursday - the winter solstice, and how appropriate is that? - we lined up on Durham station, scrutinising the people alighting from the train, and guessed right straight off. On Friday morning, Durham decorated itself in the first heavy crystalline frost of the winter, and we took

nineweaving to the cathedral (the scenic route, via the allotments and the Count's House. In the afternoon we went into Newcastle, and

desperance gave us the tour of the Lit & Phil - on on, via the Vampire Rabbit and the site of Thomas Bewick's workshop, along the Quayside, strung with lights in the night, to the Sage. The concert came at the end of a tour revisiting the seasonal round of the Watersons' 1964 album Frost and Fire, and it had an "end of term" feel to it. There was a great crowd on stage: as well as Norma Waterson, and Martin and Eliza Carthy, and Tim van Eyken (previously unknown to me, and a great voice), there were singers Devil's Interval and a clutch of musicians, joined from time to time by dancers, or disguising themselves for the mummers' play - the whole played in by the recorded voice of Mike Waterson. Never a dull moment, and if the sheer scale of the entertainment rather diluted its intensity (to my taste, at least), the party mood was infectious, and it was enormous fun. But in between all of these entertainments flowed a torrent of conversation, and that was wonderful: we talked of music and libraries and places, of stories and ethnomycology and families, and sculpture and LJ and friends - and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings. We made respectable inroads into the 50 years of conversation we haven't had yet, and I can't wait to pick up and do it again.