Tales of the Unexpected
May. 26th, 2010 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOn Sunday, we managed to lose ourselves, walking within a few miles of home. It's unusual for us to be walking without a map, even on familiar ground, but it was a hot day, and the forecast held out the prospect of cooler weather at the coast, so we didn't stop to look for the local map, but just took those that we expected to need. Almost as soon as we set off, though, we realised that the car was still making the alarming noises that had started the day before, so we changed our minds and decided to stay closer to home. There's a footpath we'd never explored which plunges into woodland just beyond the crematorium, and we followed it...
...and as we had hoped the bluebells - although they were slightly past their best - were not yet over, and the light was dim under the trees and bright where it filtered through the leaves, and the path wandered through the woodland drom one pool of blue to the next, until it brought us to a t-junction where our path met a broad track on an embankment. Turning left would, we thought, take us back towards our starting point, and we weren't ready for that yet, so we turned right, and soon came out of the forest and into a field. And while we weren't exactly lost (we could, for example, hear the traffic on the A167), we didn't exavtly know where we were, either. And it took a certain amount of tracing the edges of fields, walking round three sides of a rectangle until I, at least, was none too sure which way I was headed, before we recognised a right of way just one field away (through that patch of nettles and brambles, and across that barbed wire fence).
After which it was an easy walk through Houghall Woods and the Botanic Gardens back to where we'd left the car.
In the evening we went out to see Julie Felix at the Gala Studio, in a spirit of 'oh, well, why not?' I remember her as someone whose voice I enjoyed, from whom I learned some fine songs - Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Space Girl, for example, which has resurfaced recorded by the Imagined Village. I was curious to know what new songs she might bring with her, forty years later. It doesn't work that way, of course, and what she sang was a mixture of old favourites and her own compositions, in a style that has become rather too mannered and dramatic for my taste.
Nonetheless, worth a try, and I wouldn't have regretted going, even if for the music again. But the really pleasant surprise of the evening was not part of the show at all, but an unexpected meeting - except that the person we met was there as Julie's bookings manager and general roadie! I won't say 'an old friend', this was someone we'd met and liked very much several years ago, and never quite got to know well enough to claim her as a friend before we drifted out of touch. Now it seems we are to have a second chance.
Bonus Julie Felix links: listening to her list the great songwriters whose material she had recorded, I wondered why, given her political activism, she didn't mention Phil Ochs - had she never sung any of his songs? Well, yes, it seems she had. And I don't know why I didn't know her version of Geordie: it's wonderful.
Last night we went to see Natalie Merchant at the Sage. I had no idea what she had been working on, or what material she was likely to perform. I didn't really look at the concert information, I just saw she was appearing and told![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler that this was one we couldn't miss. Ah, here's the advance information: well, it says she has just released a new album, but it doesn't give any clues about it (and I see it still says 'plus special guests', though in fact she played without a support act - just over two hours of her own wonderful music).
It turns out that the new album is a collection of Natalie Merchant's settings of poems, chosen with her young daughter in mind: songs for, about and by children. Instead of integrating the new material with the old, the main part of the concert was an illustrated lecture around the poems. There was a sort of diffidence, a need to reassure us that the album contained something of value, the biographical notes and portraits of the poets with whom she had unilaterally collaborated. This was charming, and interesting, but quite unnecessary, because the songs are splendid: BBC Scotland has four examples. Charles Causley's Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience was the high point of my evening. I'm a little nervous about the record, because I so loved the intimacy of the arrangements we heard (as in the video).
And now for something completely different: a white puffin; white puffin and friend; scroll down for a (small) photo of a white puffin on Fair Isle.
...and as we had hoped the bluebells - although they were slightly past their best - were not yet over, and the light was dim under the trees and bright where it filtered through the leaves, and the path wandered through the woodland drom one pool of blue to the next, until it brought us to a t-junction where our path met a broad track on an embankment. Turning left would, we thought, take us back towards our starting point, and we weren't ready for that yet, so we turned right, and soon came out of the forest and into a field. And while we weren't exactly lost (we could, for example, hear the traffic on the A167), we didn't exavtly know where we were, either. And it took a certain amount of tracing the edges of fields, walking round three sides of a rectangle until I, at least, was none too sure which way I was headed, before we recognised a right of way just one field away (through that patch of nettles and brambles, and across that barbed wire fence).
After which it was an easy walk through Houghall Woods and the Botanic Gardens back to where we'd left the car.
In the evening we went out to see Julie Felix at the Gala Studio, in a spirit of 'oh, well, why not?' I remember her as someone whose voice I enjoyed, from whom I learned some fine songs - Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Space Girl, for example, which has resurfaced recorded by the Imagined Village. I was curious to know what new songs she might bring with her, forty years later. It doesn't work that way, of course, and what she sang was a mixture of old favourites and her own compositions, in a style that has become rather too mannered and dramatic for my taste.
Nonetheless, worth a try, and I wouldn't have regretted going, even if for the music again. But the really pleasant surprise of the evening was not part of the show at all, but an unexpected meeting - except that the person we met was there as Julie's bookings manager and general roadie! I won't say 'an old friend', this was someone we'd met and liked very much several years ago, and never quite got to know well enough to claim her as a friend before we drifted out of touch. Now it seems we are to have a second chance.
Bonus Julie Felix links: listening to her list the great songwriters whose material she had recorded, I wondered why, given her political activism, she didn't mention Phil Ochs - had she never sung any of his songs? Well, yes, it seems she had. And I don't know why I didn't know her version of Geordie: it's wonderful.
Last night we went to see Natalie Merchant at the Sage. I had no idea what she had been working on, or what material she was likely to perform. I didn't really look at the concert information, I just saw she was appearing and told
durham_rambler that this was one we couldn't miss. Ah, here's the advance information: well, it says she has just released a new album, but it doesn't give any clues about it (and I see it still says 'plus special guests', though in fact she played without a support act - just over two hours of her own wonderful music).It turns out that the new album is a collection of Natalie Merchant's settings of poems, chosen with her young daughter in mind: songs for, about and by children. Instead of integrating the new material with the old, the main part of the concert was an illustrated lecture around the poems. There was a sort of diffidence, a need to reassure us that the album contained something of value, the biographical notes and portraits of the poets with whom she had unilaterally collaborated. This was charming, and interesting, but quite unnecessary, because the songs are splendid: BBC Scotland has four examples. Charles Causley's Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience was the high point of my evening. I'm a little nervous about the record, because I so loved the intimacy of the arrangements we heard (as in the video).
And now for something completely different: a white puffin; white puffin and friend; scroll down for a (small) photo of a white puffin on Fair Isle.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-26 10:09 pm (UTC)Alan Francis’s notes on his Causley A Ballad for Katherine of Aragon (page 6) make for interesting reading, as he introduced us both to it: Alan also mentions
Ha! - I know what you did
Date: 2010-05-29 03:54 pm (UTC)And if instead you'd turned left at 'the t-junction where your path met a broad track on an embankment' and simply followed the track, it would have skirted a sewage works and climbed a slope, leading you to the end of Hollingside Lane ... then it's 400 yds further to the Bot Gdn.
But I expect you looked at the 1:25000 map when you got home and saw all this. All the best - Bob the Bolder
Re: Ha! - I know what you did
Date: 2010-06-01 06:16 pm (UTC)Yes, we realised that turning left at the T-junction would bring us to the Botanic Gardens - we weren't ready to do that yet, which is why we turned right! And we worked out afterwards what we'd done (from Google Earth, but the principle's the same).