A Square with Four Sides

August Bank Holiday weekend, Shrewsbury Folk Festival is on. I am supposed to be busy packing my bags for my holiday and tidying the Tortoise Loft. (No more posts from me for a while, but watch out for pictures and a report when I get back in September.)

But knowing there was folk dancing going on in The Square, and that the sun was shining, I allowed myself one hour off, and took my camera with me.

The first of the four sides I saw were One Step Beyond, doing Appalachian step dancing. They moved fast, and it was hard to catch them on camera.

Next up, Crook Morris, a mixed morris side: white shirts and hankies, amazing hats and high-energy dancing.

Two East Shropshire sides: The ladies of the Severn Gilders dance in clogs, while The Ironmen keep up the wild Border Morris tradition, with wooden staves, blackened faces and tatters.



The beautifully decorated Square makes a fine setting for morris dancing. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the hats from the hanging baskets!

And on that happy note, I’ll say farewell for now. See you back here in the second half of September, if I don’t see you in Melbourne.

A Busy Month

August has been hectic so far, and likely to remain so. I’ve been busy getting some pictures together for an art show in Melbourne – I’ve finally finished them now, all packed and ready to put in the post.

On the home front, the housing association did a property survey at the end of July, which resulted in new kitchen taps and two new window units at the Tortoise Loft. The one in the living room replaces a pane that has been a milky, murky eyesore for as long as I’ve lived here, and the increase in light is wonderful.

Here it is, freshly installed, still bearing the workmen’s fingerprints. (Not much of view, but at least I can see it.)

My mother has been in respite care for a fortnight, to give my father a much needed break. So I’ve been making trips to Bishop’s Castle to visit her. (She’s been very well looked after at Stonehouse.) The bus trip takes an hour and runs through some fine Shropshire scenery, through Pontesbury and Minsterley and then along the wooded Hope Valley and into the South Shropshire hill country with views of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones before dropping down into Bishops Castle, a fine old town. (These pictures were taken in November 2007. More pictures of the town here, here and here)

Harvesting is well under way, the trees are beginning to turn colour, and the long, light summer mornings and evenings are going fast. But in a couple of weeks it will be spring again, at least for me. My pictures are not the only ones going to Melbourne – I shall be flying out too, for the World Science Fiction Convention and a short holiday with Kevon – although with the current threat of airport strikes, I am not entirely sure if I will get away on schedule.

So I am busy with preparations for the trip, and trying to get the place tidy again and clear up the mess from making and mounting my artwork. It looks like an explosion in a stationer’s shop right now. I shall have friends looking after the Tortoise Loft while I am away, so I need to leave it tidy. And I am not a tidy person by nature. I always keep the place clean. I can do ‘neat’ when I am making things, but ‘tidy’ is very, very hard work. (I assume it’s a dyspraxic trait to work in what looks like a total muddle and find clearing up after myself a struggle, but maybe it’s just me?)

So much to do, so few days in which to do it…. But it will be worth it to see Kevon again.

Marquee

I’ve not taken many photographs of late – I’ve been busy working on drawings for a forthcoming art show in my spare time, and catching up on housework. But this morning, an intermittantly-sunny Sunday morning, I took the opportunity to wander along the riverbank to the Quarry Park with my camera. The Dingle Gardens were looking fine and full of colour, as they usually are, but I was far more interested in the shapes and textures of the marquees which are in the process of being erected for the Flower Show next month.

Getting In

It has been a tiring week as I have been working full time while Sheila, my job-sharer, has been away on holiday. So when I came home from work on Friday I was looking forward to a lazy evening and a nice early night. Instead I spent most of yesterday evening assisting in amateur housebreaking.

My downstairs neighbour rang my doorbell at about seven. He had left his keys at someone’s house with no way of retrieving them before today and he couldn’t get into his flat. He spent a long time trying to open the security deadlock using various things poked in through the letterbox. (Three of my coathangers died in this cause and I have an electric cable in need of hospitalisation: the plug came off while it was being used as a lasso.) After an hour of futile endevour, we rang the housing association out-of-hours service to get someone called-out to open the door. Meanwhile my neighbour went back downstairs to keep on trying to do it himself.

After another three hours, a chap from the housing association’s repair company turned up from Telford in a van. He wasn’t a specialist locksmith and was a bit stumped. After taking a good look at my front door for comparison, he and my neighbour got the back of the letterbox off with a crowbar. My neighbour had already managed to unbolt the front of the letterbox from outside, using one of my spanners, but he couldn’t remove the inside section. After that they were taking turns at reaching in through the letterbox hole, trying to get the doorknob to turn using an adjustable wrench. Quite impressive gymnastics (I should have taken photos), but to no effect.

The repair man was just about to give up and get a jigsaw to cut a piece out of the door when, on the umpteenth attempt, my neighbour finally hit the jackpot with the wrench. There was a loud click and an even louder sigh of relief all round. Mission accomplished.

It was half past ten. I collected up my tools and went to bed.

Where Do Sheep Go On Holiday?

One of those haunting questions. (Thanks to Felix Abrinski for sending my mind on this track with a comment on Facebook.) Do Sheep all go to the same place? And what do they do when they get there?

Your Suggestions Please!

Sun, Steam and a Woolly Jumper

Yesterday was sunny, warm and dry – with just enough breeze to keep things pleasant. And it was also the day of the monthy outing of the Shropshire Community Flickr Group. Our destination was Oswestry’s Park Hall Showground, and the annual show of the Clwyd Veteran and Vintage Machinery Society. They are based in Wrexham.

Jason picked me up from Shrewsbury and collected James at Baschurch on the way to the showground. At the entrance, we met up with Peter and the four of us stayed together all day. The show had fewer steam engines than I expected, although those on display were beautifully maintained. An Aveling and Porter road-roller, a big black Fowler engine and a Marshall along with a delightful old fire engine inscribed ‘Earl of Chester – Volunteer Fire Brigade’. There were some scale model engines, too.

It might have been a bit short of steam, but there were plenty of other exhibits. A vast number of tractors, a beautiful Romany wagon - as beautiful inside as out – and a good number of old cars, lorries, buses, motorcycles and farm machinery. There were also collections on show – die-cast models, chainsaws, wheelchairs, mowers, tools…. Even a display of old milk bottles lovingly presented! Shire horses, birds of prey, sideshows, a big model railway giving rides, and a selection of events in the areana.

It wouldn’t be a machinery show without  lots of stalls selling things: sweets and toys and ice cream. (Great weather for ice cream sales!) Books, antiques, crafts – there was a whole hall of craft stalls as well as the outdoor stalls – food stalls. (I had lunch at a Thai food stall: an excellent red curry made fresh while I waited.)
 Stalls selling strange odd bits of machinery and metal laid out with as much care as the enthusiasts’ displays. And charcters, types, interesting faces. Plenty of scope for people-watching.

One of the arena displays was a man with an elderly sheepdog and a performing sheep. The sheep walked through a hoop and jumped little fences while being pulled along on a lead. (I gather they were both herding ducks later, but we didn’t stay for the rest of the show.)

Needless to say, I took a lot of photos. You’ll find more of them here.

We were expecting to spend a couple of hours at the showground, at most, and then go on to a Food and Drink Festival. But we stayed twice as long as intended, because there was so much to see. We decided to skip the Food and Drink and went off to Wales instead – to the River Dee and the Pontcysyllte Aquaduct near Llangollen. In the sunshine. And then home.

Library

Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done for several years: I got a couple of books out of the library.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it, coming from someone who so fond of reading – let alone someone who lives almost within a stone’s throw of the library? But it’s true. I’ve been into the library quite a few times, researching this and that, but it’s many years since I have wanted to take a library book home with me.

The main part of Shrewsbury’s library is housed in the old Shrewsbury School building. With a fine statue of Charles Darwin outside – educated here. The music library is housed in a room which still has the old panelling on the walls, covered in schoolboy names and initials, cut deeply into the wood, usually in rather fine handwriting.

It was the music section that drew me this time. I tend to get most of my fiction reading from charity shops – much of it returns for resale – and since I’ve had Internet access, I have found less and less need to go across the road to look up facts. However, the guitar occasionally needs feeding with new songs, and I thought it would make sense to see what could be borrowed, before I get tempted into buying new songbooks or waste more hours chasing things down on the web. And once I’d had my elderly library card replaced with a shiny new one, I came out happily clutching a couple of collections of tunes with a few ‘possibles’ in each.

(Much of this afternoon has vanished in transposing and getting to grips with ’Carolina in my Mind’. Which turns out a great deal less daunting than I expected, once I’d rescued it from the key of F and put it safely down in G to get rid of the flats. I flatly refuse to play flats, except B flat. One has to draw a line somewhere. I will put up with a modest number of sharps.)

One advantage of not having borrowed from the library for so many years is that they may have had some turnover in the fiction section since I stopped bothering to look at it. Maybe there will be some new non-fiction on subjects that interest me? Who knows? I may have been lured back into library usage by the demands of a hungry guitar, but there’s a lot more than music in Shrewsbury Library (quite apart from the joy of being inside a lovely and historic building). I’m looking forward to my next visit….

May Contain Nuts

It’s May. Time For another update on recent activity. First up, on May Day itself: Eric, my father had his 90th Birthday. Here he is on his special day:

My sister was visiting from London. So along with my mother and I the whole family were together. Friends kept turning up with presents and cards, relatives phoned. After lunch – Dad’s birthday choice of sausage, mash and peas, cooked by my sister – he found it a bit overwhelming. So he went off to his den for a spot of quiet computer programming.

‘Tis of a fair young maiden, and she lived down in Kent,
Arose one sunny morning, and she a nutting went….

You can’t have May without a spot of morris, can you? So I’ve been adding The Nutting Girl to my guitar repertoire. I am enjoying learning new songs and tunes, especially when I have worked out the chords for myself, as I did with this one. Thanks to inspiration from Graham Higgins, I’ve been tackling La Mer – now that’s tricky to master! But I am getting better at it. I started with chords off the web for La Mer, but Lady Franklin’s Lament is another one I have worked out for myself. It’s a real joy to have a guitar on hand again.

Shropshire Community Flickr Group are doing a ‘Photo a Day’ challenge for May. (Last year we did one in April.) I’m not always remembering to take a photo until the light is fading, but so far I’ve managed to keep up, although they’re not all quality shots! Here are a couple of them.

The rest are accumulating here.

Bellowhead on St George’s Day

On Friday 23rd April, I went to see Bellowhead in concert at Theatre Severn. If you’ve not yet heard the band, have a look at (and a listen to) their website. Eleven remarkably talented people, an amazingly eclectic range of instruments and bags of energy. Definitely worth seeing live.

This was a seated gig, which meant I got to see them for the first time. I’d find it hard to cope with a standing concert. They played plenty of their best known pieces, including Fakenham Fair and Cholera Camp, and many new songs from their forthcoming album. Which should be a corker: I still can’t get New York Girls (“Can’t You Dance the Polka?”) out of my head! A great evening, and if you get a chance to catch this band, grab it!

Some of you will be saying: Hang on Sue, you posted an earlier version of this report with some photos of the band in concert. So where are they now?

I did. I had my camera with me at the concert, I had a stalls seat with an unobstructed view of the stage, and I  took several photos in the first half of the evening – I’d seen other cameras and mobile phones in use so it seemed to be allowed. But shortly after the break, a member of the Theatre Severn staff came over and that photography wasn’t permitted. Oops! So I stopped.

I’ve not had much luck with my photos in theatre settings before, but I had half a dozen shots of the band that I was really pleased with. Nice and clear. So the next morning I proudly posted them on Flickr and put some of them in a blog post here.

And then I started feeling uncomfortable as they were unauthorised. I like to keep my conscience clear, so I won’t be showing them again unless I get permission from the band or something. The rules don’t say ‘no sketching’ so you’ll have to make do with a drawing for now. Or better still, go and see Bellowhead for yourselves – it’s worth it!

STOP PRESS: Hey, a band that reads blog posts! I feel very honoured. Here’s a couple of shots – they link back to Flickr, where you’ll find the rest.

Small Things

This morning I was assisting the police.

Well, almost. Shrewsbury Town Centre Residents’ Association were helping with a litter-pick organised by the local Community Support Officers. I decided to go along and do my bit. An hour’s gentle exercise on a sunny Sunday morning, followed by a free cup of tea or coffee in MacDonalds. The police officers issued us all with binbags and litter-picking tongs, and off we went.

There wasn’t much large litter in the area I walked – the council sweeping machines had already been through – so it was mostly cigarette ends lodged bewteen the paving stones, and the odd sweet wrapper. Picking up dog-ends proved an absorbing task, and the tongs were remarkably efficient. It was a novelty to find anything that wasn’t a cigarette end. I found only one match, clear evidence of the ubiquity of the lighter these days. (And one broken lighter, too.) Pieces of a smashed bottle, a paperclip, various bits of paper, a half-eaten peppermint, lumps of chewing gum, lolly sticks, a few plastic wrappers. All small things. Eventually we returned with our hauls, and handed tongs and bags to the police officers before heading for MacDonalds and our free drink. (MacDonalds had also provided a young member of their team to help the group, and he picked up almost as much as the rest of us combined. Well done, Adam.)

As I handed back my efficient tong, I thought how useful it would have been last night, when I tried to pick up another small thing.

It was time for bed. I’d just taken my supper plate out to the kitchen, and as I came back into the living room, I saw a darkish lump on the carpet just inside the door. In the dim light, I assumed it was a bit of crust from my bread, fallen from the plate, and casually picked it up.

Ouch! It was a big wasp, and it stung me on the thumb.

It must have been one of last year’s wasps, just out of hibernation. Fortunately it was trying to sting me on the side of my right thumb just where I use it when playing the guitar. All my recent practice paid off, as the sting barely penetrated. (It felt no worse than a bad nettle sting, and from memories of wasp stings in my youth, I got nothing like the full dose of venom.)

After this things got rather farcical. I put a cup over the wasp, slid a postcard under it and proceeded to the bathroom, where I opened the window and evicted the wasp. Shut window, turn on bathroom light – the wasp had come straight back in and was now wandering around in the bath.

Cup, postcard, turn out light, open window, evict wasp, shut window quickly. Turn on light. 

The wasp had beaten me to it again. It was now making victory laps of the lightbulb, buzzing angrily. After a while it retreated to the top of the curtain rail, out of reach of my cup, and stared down at me, looking smug, waving its antennae and daring me to have a go. I decided to leave it be, rushed my evening ablutions, and left the bathroom windows open - in the hope that the morning light would lure it outside before I got up.

When I went into the now-very-cold bathroom first thing this morning, the wasp was still where I had last seen it, on the rail. I wondered if the cold had killed it? At which point it turned and looked at me again, giving me a sleepy wave with its antennae. Battle resumed. I grabbed the feather duster and dislodged it. The wasp landed on its back on the windowsill, still very dozy, and grabbed hold of the duster to right itself. At which point it was very firmly catapulted through the open window, and had already descended a couple of storeys before it got its wings sorted out.

So far it hasn’t come back.