In celebration of the life of Pat (Eades) Hyett

Pat (Eades) Hyett

This week's session was a celebration of the life of our good friend Pat who died recently and it was great to see an excellent turn-out. Proceeds from the evening will go to St Peter's Hospice where she was cared for in the last week of her life. Many people will know her as Pat Eades (or Patricia Eades from her articles in her local parish magazine) but this summer she married her partner of twelve years, Keith Hyett and became Pat Hyett. many people can remember that day spent with Pat and Keith celebrating their marriage, and Pat was on great form.

While Mike and Maggie were definitely present, and Mike's dog, Indy, in fine voice, MC duties were taken up by Richard, who showed his prowess in identifying tunes (most of the time) and kept everyone well in order.

Taking the Michael

Cyril Tawney,
who wrote Grey Funnel Line

(I would like to thank Derek who stood in for me as "scribe" at this week's session and provided the following report)

With your regular scribe absent, an exhausted and ashen-faced replacement arrived, having come from running, for Sport Relief, a one mile cross-country in a torrential hailstorm.

With Mike and Maggie lost to the fleshpots of Bognor, reliving their babyhoods in the 1960s, Richard was in charge of a small but select band who met to celebrate the Spring, discuss music, swap anecdotes – but most of all to sing our way through as much of Mike's repertoire as possible before he could get back and fine us.

Mike's musical proclivities therefore led to a lot of shanties, fore-bitters and just general Songs of the Seven Seas being performed, in the certain knowledge that even if none of us could remember his singing the song in question, provided that it had a ship in it somewhere, he probably had dibs on it anyway. So the evening sailed along from the Grey Funnel Line to the Fish of the Sea (the latter being a version remarkably deficient – to my East Anglian ear – in any mention of Happisburg Light!) and from the Shantyman of the Wildgoose Nation to Roll the Woodpile Down (which at my advanced age I always associate with Dave Macon).