Music and fun at Majors Creek Folk Festival

Friday evening when Danz got home from work we loaded the car with our camping gear and headed to Majors Creek to enjoy their biannual folk festival. It was only a couple of hours drive so we had the tent up and were enjoying our first show for the festival by 8pm.

The camp site filled quickly. It was a lovely setting, surrounded by magnificent trees and everything spring green. 


Here are a few of the performances we saw,

Martin Pearson in the Main tent. Musician, raconteur extraordinaire. He told a hilarious story about folk music fads and, for the benefit of those who weren't around the folk music scene in the late 90's, described hand carved wooden djembes as 'like a hand carved toilet bowl'. Very accurate, I thought!

 Black Joak Morris from Sydney. They are a great team and were demonstrating a dance for a workshop when I took this shot. The bells, the sticks - it was all there, a graphic demonstration of how the picts fought off the Romans! No wonder they had to high tail it  to Scotland until the Romans left :-)

 Not sure who these folk were but they sang beautifully and seemed to be in the business of selling millet brooms.

This is Riogh, lovely Irish songs performed in this beautiful old church

The sense of being nestled in a cosy and natural, but powerful environment was intense

I did quite a few paintings of performers (you can see them here) and this one of the field;

All up a pretty fantastic way to spend a weekend. Everyone was happy, lots of good music, people of all ages mixing happily and respectfully, beautiful weather, great spot. I'll be there in 2013.

I ♥ tea

I love tea.  I mean it, I really do love tea. It has been a lifelong commitment gifted to me by my tea loving mother. I love tea so much that sometimes (and you know which times I mean)  I will think 'I feel like a glass of wine.....no, I think I'll have a cup of tea!'. It's true. 


In the heady days of tea bag love when everyone was throwing out their teapots and jiggling, dangling, and littering the kitchen with the paper and tea version of dead mice, I staunchly held onto my wild tea drinking ways and stuck with the leaves and pot. Fortunately for us die-hards the wheel has turned the proverbial full circle and tea drinkers even have dedicated shops to browse, sample and drool in.




Mostly I love Indian or Sri Lankan black teas, but green tea with mint, and jasmine tea are other enduring faves.  French Earl Grey from Adore Tea at Gold Creek is my latest passion. Thinking about it makes me feel like having a cup. 

Some great tea quotes:

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.  ~T'ien Yiheng

There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims   (Ralph, I couldn't agree with you more!)

Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company.  ~Author Unknown

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.  ~Sydney Smith   (me too, Sydney, me too)

Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary.  ~Chinese Proverb

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.
~Rudyard Kipling

 Thank goodness mine doesn't leak Ruddy!

Tea is a cup of life.  ~Author Unknown

I must go and put the kettle on. Happy sipping!

Bedside table...

My bedside table is tremendously important to me. I read, knit, think, drink tea, listen to ebooks (while knitting!) and write when I am in or on my bed, so keeping all the necessaries nearby is important.

Lately I have been reading Ted Hughes letters and have gone through the full cycle of love/hate/love/like with that man! He was a great poet and writer and always congnisant of the fact that his letters would have a life beyond being personal communications. He has reignited my interest in Shakespeare, and I love this poem...

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird--
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline--blackening dregs of the brightening grey--
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey--ten together--
Megalith still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world..


..it goes on. Very evocative and lovely.

This is my town

I went for an early morning walk, camera in hand.

How to have a GREAT weekend!

1. Find some odd local event that has almost nothing to do with anything you are normally interested in and go along for the ride......

yep, that is a knight! 

dancing and musicians

knights on horseback

jousting!!

We had fun at the Medieval Fair :-)

 2. Let the pups take you for a walk...

3. Buy some pumpernickel bread, pretzels and Heineken beer and have your own private Octoberfest!

'Cheers!'

Take time to smell the roses.