Emerges, blinking, into the daylight

[shewhomust]

It's not that I haven't been posting much, exactly - or only rapid, throwaway posts (which I enjoy, but feel don't really count). But I've been nibbling away at a longish post about Shetland, and not getting to the point where I'm ready to post it. It begins with a paragraph about how hot it is here, and what a contrast to our cool, rainy holiday - and that paragraph gets edited each time I revisit the post, which is silly. Right now I'm shaping up for a five-things-makes-a-post type post (and even that has been taking longer than I intended), so let's have the weather report as the first of those five things, and get it out of the way.

• It was too hot, serious record-breaking summer. Fortunately the house does a good job of staying pleasantly cool (mostly), and the heat came as a real surprise each time I went outside, which I did as little as possible: to go to the pool, to put out and bring in the dustbin. Increasingly I gave in to the temptation to stay downstairs, writing in my notebook at the kitchen table, rather than use my desktop in the attic, where the heat rises and lingers. The heat makes me idle, too, or that's my excuse for spending afternoons lying on the sofa with a book. Also, I was sleeping badly, and was drowsy during the day. But on Thursday there were ominous rumblings in the sky, and on Friday the heavens opened. It's too early to declare the summer heatwave over, but for the time being the weather reports warn of floods, not of heatstroke. I'm not complaining.



• Would I be as sanguine about the rain if I had been caught in the downpour? Yes, as it happens I was and I am. We had a repeat of last year's lunch date with anef who is in Durham for the Classics Summer School, and this time she was accompanied by doubtingmichael - at lunch, not at the summer school. So there were four of us to explore the tapes menu, and discuss tales from Herodotus, and discover that we had people in common offline as well as on (doubtingmichael had been in a writing group with valydiarosada). After which we set off to enjoy our various afternoons. Mine included the Oxfam bookshop, at which I disappointingly failed to make any purchases (it's the old complaint that their prices would be reasonable if I had gone into the shop in search of that particular book, but do not tempt me to impulse purchases). On the way home - it's not a long way, but I stopped off at the market and the greengrocer - I was caught in three separate showers.



• Back home, the kitchen was also awash, as we were in the process of defrosting the fridge. This is always painful, as we always leave it too long. The fridge is supposed to be self-defrosting, but all this means is that there is no mechanism to speed up the process. In that sense, doing it during a heatwave made sense, although it left us with no way to refrigerate anything (the milk lake was the main casualty here). But once the frisge starts dripping on the floor, there is no arguing with it, you might as well switch it off, and declare the defrosting official. I dislodged a coule of chunks of ice, realised that the process was not yet complete, and had a shower instead. Mid-afternoon showering felt quite decadent, but I was already so wet that why not?



• durham_rambler showed me a picture in the Guardian: "They've found a Roman biro!" he said. Obviously, I assumed he was talking about Vindolanda, bui no, this was in London: I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pen...cite



• We accidentally dipped into Folk on Tyne day at the Sage. We had booked for a concert billed as showcasing artists from Hudson Records, headlining the Furrow Collective, but the flavour of the event was very much as if we had dipped a ladle into a festival. A couple of people mentioned that Hudson Records' Andy Bell and his wife had just had their second baby, and that Andy had delivered it himself before the ambulance arrived, so it may be that he had planned to be more present through the day than he actually was. For whatever reason, it felt less like a single concert than like three spots following each other into Hall 2, while other performances went on in the foyer (not to mention another concert in Hall 1). Only the first of the three was actually introduced by anyone from the Sage (brownie points to the Furrow Collective, who are perfectly capable of introducing themselves / each other). The sense of an impromptu, drop-in show was increased by getting rid of the stage, and putting the performers in the centre of the hall. Hall 2 performances are always theoretically in the round anyway, since the upper tiers have seating over the back of the stage, but this made the performers very conscious of it, and some of them coped better than others.
  
  Opening act Jock Tyldesley & Vera Van Heeringen simply sat facing each other, so that some of the audience had a sideways view of both of them, and other people saw someone full face and someone's back - and they just got on with it, which was fine. Their tastes (post New Rope String Band, which is where I first met them) run more to Americana than mine do, but I enjoyed their set. If you want to know what it was like, YouTube has a fair selection of stuff, I won't preselect.
  
  Piper Brighde Chaimbeul ('with' Aidan O'Rourke, but she's clearly the star) was completely unknown to me, and the two of them seemed the most thrown by the 'in the round' presentation: Aidan O' Rourke mused that it would be good if the floor was a turntable - and it would indeed, but there's surely nothing to stop the two of them turning round, or changing places (spoiler: the Furrow Collective managed it). Musically, a lovely sound, but very repetitive: the style seems to be that the tunes are short, and you play one over and over again: if there was more than minimal variation going on, it was too subtle for me.
  
  Finally. the Furrow Collective came on at ten o'clock, just as Jon Boden was starting his set in the foyer. I had liked them fine when we saw them three years ago, but by now I was getting grouchy about the lateness of the hour - it had been a long day. Anyway, the moment they started I was happy again. Which is odd, because their sound was both sweeter and more delicate than I expect to like, but it had a unity that made it work. Mostly they seem to have been performing material from their new(ish) album, Fathoms, which it appears to be possible to listen to, track by track, on YouTube. Start, as they did on Saturday, with Davy Lowston. The one video I've been able to find was the odd-track-out of the performance, but none the worse for that:
  
  
  "The Furrow Collective - Chuir M’Athair Mise dhan Taigh Charraideach" (Watch on YouTube)
  
  
  featuring Rachel Newton, with stamping from Lucy Farrell.
  
  I would have liked more than a half-hour set - or at least an encore, but that wasn't the style of the evening. So we emerged into the foyer to find Jon Boden just starting his last number, at full power. Was it just the contrast that made this too loud for comfort? Or would we have needed to be at the party all along to cope with this high note? durham_rambler commented that he was over-amplified; perhaps he hadn't realised that he was no longer competing for our attention with the whole of Bellowhead. It was an odd note on which to end our evening - of course, we could have stayed for the disco - and of course we didn't. I did buy Fathom, though.