Valentine's Day 2020

(Photo: Simon Meeds)

At our Valentine's Day session it was great to see Mel return for his second visit and even better that he indicated it is likely to become a regular occurrence. There were many songs of love and/or lust and a few which were simply calendar-relevant.

Colin, our MC, started things off with Jan Knuckey.

Let's get out of the way the songs which referred to the calendar rather than to love and lust. The ones I spotted were Mike's Last Valentine's Day (Roud 6475) and Derek's Bold Princess Royal (Roud 528, Laws K29).

Simon's slightly sideways glance at Valentine started with reminiscences of a love lost with Harvey Andrews' Margarita. Mike's more conventional approach, if with some playing hard-to-get was Come Write Me Down (Roud 381).

Yet another musical miscellany

The Mary Rose in a battle with seven Algerine corsairs
(an engraving by Wenceslas Hollar
who was on the ship at the time)

There was no theme for last week's session so we were free to come up with clusters of songs around various topics.

Colin was the MC and Mike kicked us off with the topical The Twenty Fourth of February (Roud 951) (sorry I couldn't find a recording in English), although he sang "twenty third". Apparently it describes a battle which took place on 29 December 1669 where Captain John Kempthorne on the fifth Mary Rose saved a convoy from attack by seven ships of Algerine pirates. He was knighted for this action.

Death warmed up

I am slightly nervous about this week's blog report. The main reason is that I was quite justifiably roasted for an error I made (now corrected) in my previous report. Secondly because Derek typically took my error as a challenge and sang several versions of similar and not-so-similar songs, in an attempt to make the point about my error, or our "little domestic" as he put it. It was all in good humour of course but gives me a challenge since it was the difficulty of working out the background to what he sang last time that led to the error in the first place. I make no guarantees I have it right this week!

Richard took up the mantle of MC, and started us off himself with The Girl I Left Behind Me.