Contemptible or unaccomplished?

We look forward to seeing hoards of you this Friday for our slightly early Christmas themed session. Come ready to perform songs, tunes, poems, monologues, stories or jokes on the subject of Christmas, Yule or Bah-Humbug, or anything really that takes your fancy. There should be mince pies for the interval.

Last week's session had no theme and the contributions were quite varied as you will see from the usual "selection" link at the bottom of this post. MC, Colin started us off on a theme of leather on willow with The Cricketers Of Hambledon (Bruce Blunt, Peter Warlock).

Geoff followed on with Nowhere Man (Lennon-McCartney) making life very easy for this scribe to find a video. Slightly more difficult to find is Derek's Three Wee Glasgow Molls (Roud 6960). Colin was the only one this time to sing a song I couldn't trace at all which should probably be an embarrassment since Mike clearly knew it and I think Derek may have known it too.

Tunes help you breathe more easily

With your regular scribe away on the road to Gallivant, I find myself thrown off the comfortable subs' bench to report the pre-Easter meeting of the Dragon Club. [With notes like this from the regular scribe]

The unfortunate incapacity of Maggie, who broke her wrist in a dog-walking-related incident, meant that Indie (apparently not suffering any Maggie-walking-related injuries) arrived accompanied only by Mike. Mike surveyed the book to count the shell holes put into his repertoire during last week's Mikeless free-for-all, but had no difficulty in beginning with a couple of Keith Marsden songs – Idlers and Skivers and The Drovers.

We welcomed our old friend Joe, accompanied by his chauffeuse [Josci], on their first visit to the new site. Although he had not brought any song texts with him, he took the lead in singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot, eked out by other verses contributed by assorted (probably) ex-rugby players. This was enough to qualify him as one of 8 performers among the ten people present.

Difficulties for the report writer

Rollright Stones
(Photo: Angela Barnett)

Short on numbers again this week  but some fine chorus singing. I am trying to do some marketing for the
Dragon Folk Club and I'm sure Mike and Maggie are doing their bit but we just aren't getting the number of people in we would like.

Interestingly Derek mentioned it was the first anniversary of the blog. He wasn't quite right; I started it unilaterally a year ago last week and, having discussed it with Maggie and Mike, it went official a year ago next week. The first official report was for Burns' night last year. Since next week is Burns' night I will treat that as the anniversary.

However, that's not the whole point. The reason I started the blog was that Maggie was a little disappointed at the response (or lack of it) she had been having from the print and word-of-mouth advertising she had been doing. So maybe it is the time of year, or has it been a problem throughout the year? I don't know, that's one for Maggie to decide.

If you have any ideas of how we can encourage more people to join us at sessions please let us know. If there's anything you can do, then please do it. Now down to this weeks report...