This newsletter covers from October 2002 to May 2003.
It was released to an unsuspecting world on May 14th, 2003.
What a long strange trip it’s been ...
.. to quote the Grateful Dead (a good old San Francisco hippie band in case you were wondering). It’s been over 6 months since we last put a newsletter on the website, due to a combination of being busy moving back to the UK (“let’s wait until things have settled down then we’ll write the newsletter”), lethargy (“I really can’t be bothered to do the newsletter right now..”), confusion (“did we get around to doing another newsletter yet??”), prioritisation (“the newsletter is on my list of things to do…”) and finally, to be honest, wimping out (“Ohmigod, there’s SO much to put into the newsletter, I don’t know where to start”). However, since we’re now both ‘resting between engagements’ (more of which later) we really have no excuse, so here we go… and I promise I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can..
It HAS been a long time, and strangely since moving back to the UK and getting re-established in Lynne’s place in rural Warwickshire the pace of life doesn’t seem to have slackened at all in terms of the number of events etc - if anything we’re busier than ever – but at least some of the boring stuff (like commuting for example) is for now a thing of the past.
At the end of our last newsletter we’d
arrived back into the UK, but were ‘camping out’ in a rented place in Bracknell
awaiting (a) the departure of Lynne’s tenants and (b) the arrival of our goods
& chattels after their ocean cruise from San Francisco so that we could
settle back into the UK properly. Well, all of the above duly happened, so in
the last week of October we were able to move back into Lynne’s house near
Warwick. We initially moved in a few days before our furniture arrived, so that
we could do some preparation such as cleaning
and turning the conservatory into an office (we’d been spoilt in SF by
having a 4th bedroom which we used as an office). After a few days
of camping in the empty house by night, and decorating/cleaning interspersed
with trips to the local DIY megastore during the days, the container bearing
our property finally arrived and then we had about 2 weeks of
unpacking/arranging/shuffling as we tried to fit all our stuff in. It was like
one of those puzzles you get as a kid, where there are 15 pieces within a 4 x 4
grid and you have to make a picture by moving 1 square at a time. For the first
week, it wasn’t possible to move anything without making a space by moving
several other things first. You can get some idea by looking at the pics on our
website.
I also managed to (literally) blow up various electrical items as we tried to get the house together – we’d brought several transformer plugs back from the US so that some of the smaller domestic appliances we’d bought there could be used back in the UK.. well, I won’t bore you with the gory details, but suffice to say that I managed to blow up a bedside radio/alarm clock, the coffee maker and our 50 watt combo amplifier before I realised that we had 1 transformer plug that was defective. The coffee machine was particularly spectacular, with loud bangs, lots of smoke and some molten plastic. D’oh! At least the amp only needed a fuse replacing.. (I never was very good with that hardware stuff, I’m more of a software guy myself.. I also blew the power supply on Lynne’s computer and I couldn’t even blame the duff transformer for that one.)
We purposely decided to have a sort of ‘open house weekend’ in early November to force us to get the place straight(ish) by then, and it almost worked.. following some frantic retail therapy as we splashed out (using the money from our very successful U.S. ‘online yard sale’) on the various things we had to replace, mainly essential electrical stuff such as monster TV and sound system, with multi-region VHS and DVD players so we could play all our US format stuff. Many thanks to all who popped in at various points over the weekend, we had a great turn out of friends and family from both sides and it really felt that we’d properly arrived back in the UK.
Having said that, it’s been slightly weird for me as I was back in England, but not living in my own house.. we’d decided for various reasons (e.g. money) that it was better to leave my place in London rented out, given the current UK rental property market. However, Harbury is a very friendly place and of course I already knew Lynne’s pals from the local morris dancing side - and it also turned out that our new neighbour was a regular at a local pub which happened to run a quiz night on Sunday evenings.. so those of you who know me won’t be surprised to learn that I volunteered to go along one night and have been on the team ever since. This turns out to be a very good way of making new local friends (or enemies – since we keep winning the quiz).
In the meantime, Lynne was of course getting re-established back in Hereburgh Morris (and consequently having to re-learn how to play some old tunes… and somewhat more quickly than the laid-back Californian tempo she’d got used to..). As always, the Hereburgh Morris folks had a full diary of interesting events lined up – one of which was to dance at the installation of ex-member David Brindley as Dean of Portsmouth – a great day out for all involved - see pics on the website.
Of course, by now it was also getting close to the festive season, and besides the regular practices and dance-out at the Harbury Christmas Fair (in near-zero temperatures tempered occasionally by horizontal freezing rain), Lynne and the Hereburgers were involved in various events such as carol singing around the local pubs, the local church carol service (preceded of course by home-made sloe gin and chocolates at Ian and Sue’s) and the infamous Hereburgh Hangover Tour on new year’s day (a very wet one this year which resulted in some dancing INSIDE various pubs). Again, there are some pics on the website.
This time of year is a very busy (and chilly!) time for the UK folk/morris crowd, with events such as the 12th night celebration at Celia’s where any leftover Christmas booze (oops! - oxymoron alert!) gets quaffed as the assembled multitude place bets on which Christmas tree candle will take longest to burn out – and of course by then it’s wassail time and so there are several local events where morris dancing and singing to trees happens. This year was particularly cold and frosty – very atmospheric (see some pics on the website) but I can’t help admitting that all of the winter events made me think somewhat wistfully back to watching dance-outs in California where high-factor sun cream rather than several layers of thick woollies was the order of the day. Perhaps there’s scope here for a sport that England could actually do well at – Extreme Morris Dancing – in the same ilk as those sad souls who strive for recognition by ironing a shirt while hang-gliding up the north face of Everest on a lawnmower. But I digress.. back in the (relatively) sensible area of wassailing, Lynne brought back from California Jon Berger’s Berkeley Wassail and taught it to the locals, so it has now been sung to various fruit tree owners over here and looks set to become one of those instant traditions.
On the non-morris front we had a busy time too – a full complement of Lynne’s daughters for Christmas, the first time for 4 years that they’d all been together with Lynne on Christmas day.. plus visits to our new home from various members of my family. Also a great New Year’s Eve bash courtesy of Dick (of Warwick Folk Festival fame) which gave me chance to meet yet another bunch of local folk/morris people – this time from Coventry. At this party we had another one of those “small world” coincidences when we met local artist Colin Dick – as we chatted and told him about our US sojourn it transpired that his grandson was at the same school as Michele in the San Francisco, and that they’d even been involved in the same plays as they were both in the drama group! Other highlights around this time included trips to Nettlebed Folk Club to see Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy, and later Roy Bailey and John Kirkpatrick, and then more recently Blue Tapestry.
All of this was happening against
a backdrop of both Lynne and I commuting to work – Lynne had started a 5 month
contract programming job in Oxford in early December (thanks
to brother John) so she was driving there every day, while I was doing 3 days a
week (or sometimes more) in Bracknell, working from the new home office on the
other days, and staying down there one night a week… so as you can imagine,
life was more than a little hectic and consequently we didn’t have a lot of
time to do stuff (like writing newsletters for example, honest m’lud).
One of
the other things we had to do was set up a company to allow Lynne (and possibly
me eventually) to do all the right tax and accounting stuff for her
contract work and/or music stuff – so
now we are the proud owners of ActionAbility Ltd (hence my new e-mail address),
complete with cute logo (?) and we’ve even registered the web addresses
actionability.com and actionability.co.uk.
Also in early January we gained a new addition to the household – Lynne’s eldest daughter Jennie finished her job at a local hotel (which provided accommodation) and therefore has moved back in with us. She’s got another job now, so it’s sort of ironic that she’s currently the only one in the house in gainful employment!
At the end of January we decided that we should treat ourselves to a little excursion – and as some of you may recall this took the form of a week back on our old stomping ground (literally in Lynne’s case, being a morris dancer) in San Francisco. The timing was good as it coincided with a friend of ours Pete Grassby passing through SF on his way back to the UK from a stint in New Zealand where (amongst other things) he’d been playing at Auckland Folk Festival. This had been set up last year, and the original plan was for Pete to stay with us in SF, but of course this had been arranged before we knew we’d have to relocate back to the UK. However, we needed a break, and we had mountains (or whatever the right collective noun is.. maybe ‘light years’?) of Virgin air miles to use up so the flights were effectively free – so we decided to head out there for a week. This allowed Lynne to join Pete doing an English ceilidh workshop session, and also allowed me to bash some rented drums in a scratch band (mostly Cunning Plan) with Pete calling for a ceilidh on the following evening, so a jolly time was had by all. We also got chance to catch up with many of our old pals from the morris side, the yacht club, as well as ex-colleagues.. special thanks to Simona and George for hosting a BBQ for us with all the ex-WhiteCross folks. It was a great week – slightly weird being tourists in a place we knew so well, but great to see everyone again. Maybe we’ll do it again next year….(?)
It was a strange and sad feeling flying out of San Francisco again – as always when this happens fate decreed that the weather was perfect, and our take off took us on a brilliant aerial scenic tour of the bay area, with stunning views of the city, Treasure Island, the Golden Gate bridge and then up and out over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Sigh. Never mind, I’m sure that we’ll be back there again for another visit before long…
By the time we got back to the UK it was
February and we were into the commuting routine for a while. We splashed out on
a better car for Lynne to make her commute more comfortable, so we’re now a 2
Toyota family. Hers is an Avensis, and I’m still enjoying the MR2 I bought back
in October. There was some logic here – the Avensis is one of those modern
hatchbacks where the back seats fold down – therefore ideal for packing in
keyboards, accordions, amps and the odd drum kit (should the need arise). Also
it’s got enough power to tow a caravan.. and just by chance we bought one of
those too recently. The idea is that we can use the caravan to visit friends, family
and folk festivals around the country over the coming months. (For our US
readers, what we call a ‘caravan’ is what I think you folks call a ‘trailer’.
So yes, all your suspicions were true, we are in fact ‘trailer trash’ after
all..). We did our maiden voyage with the caravan to Holmfirth Folk Festival
last weekend – and very pleasant it was too. We plan to take it to several
other festivals this summer, including Chippenham, Mansfield, Sidmouth and of
course Warwick (see later for more info).
So, there we were, settling
into some sort of routine, when WhiteCross announced that there would have to
be more redundancies to cut the operating costs. To cut a long story short, I
ended up being one of the redundancies, which turns out to have been good for
us. The package was fairly generous, meaning that there was no immediate 
need
to go and get another job – and since Lynne’s contract was due to finish at the
end of April, it seemed like a golden opportunity to take some time off
together and make the most of the English summer (perhaps another oxymoron
there…?). Which is precisely what we’re doing right now – planning a leisurely
summer of folk festivals and mooching around in the garden. Actually the garden has been interesting – when we got
back it had been neglected and was very overgrown so we got a gardener in to
basically cut everything back pretty much to the bare earth, and then left it
to see what had survived. It’s been through the ‘brown’ phase (scorched earth),
and a vaguely green phase where stuff was venturing out, then we had a
white/yellow phase where snowdrops and daffodils bravely popped up. Since then
it’s been pinkish as the various fruit trees have blossomed and now it’s in a
‘blue’ period as cornflowers and bluebells make their presence felt. And we’ve
discovered some plants with serrated leaves that seem vaguely familiar from my
trips to Jamaica - we think may have been planted by the final set of student
tenants… we’ll see how they turn out.. if they’re no good we may have to just burn
them. We’re still wondering what to do with the land at the end of the garden –
best suggestion so far has been to plant a small vineyard..
Other stuff that’s worth mentioning – at the end of March we had a weekend in Dublin – this was by way of a birthday treat for me, and it happened to coincide with the Ireland-England rugby international. As always, Dublin was excellent – we were good little tourists and took a tour on one of the amphibious trucks, as well as doing the “Traditional Irish Musical Pub Crawl” on the Saturday evening. We didn’t have tickets for the match itself, we just set up camp in one of the downtown pubs with a big screen and watched it there amongst the locals – great fun (especially as England won). More recently, the regular pagan ritual of dancing the sun up at dawn on May Day was observed by the Hereburghers at Chesterton Windmill. A spectacular sky as the sun came up, if a little windy! See some nice pics on the website.
A final bit of news on the music front – Lynne and I, along with pals Mike and John have formed a ceilidh band and we did our first gig over Easter which went well enough for us to decide to carry on. We have another gig booked in July, and we’re currently in the middle of that most difficult bit with a new band – deciding on a name. There have been several suggestions – some of the less notable being “Phil O’San and the Fortified Whiners”, “Miss Spent Youth and the Senior Moments” and “The Expandable Waist Band”. (Hmmmm – do you spot a trend here?). At least we aren’t quite as bad as my previous band the (eventual) Stereotypes, who at one stage had had more names than gigs. Well, following last night’s practice and after intense discussions, I can announce that the final decision is that from now on we’ll be known as “4 in a bar”. Remember, you heard it here first. Available for weddings, funerals, fetes and bar mitzvahs (where perhaps we’d call ourselves “4 in a bar mitzvah”).
And so that brings us pretty much up to date… we’re taking time out and relaxing, hoping to do some caravan trips over the summer to visit friends, family and folk festivals. We also have another Greek sailing trip booked for late September, back to the Ionian (7th or 8th time for me!) for what should be an epic trip, as a lot of the people going are morris dancers and/or musicians. I confidently expect that following our trips to various tavernas in the course of our cruise, in 20 years or so there will be a thriving Greek morris dancing movement, with perhaps heated arguments between the Lefkas tradition and the Kefallonia tradition. We currently have 12 folks signed up and 3 boats booked – but we could fit in a couple more people (2 singles or 1 couple) if anyone out there is looking for something to do for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer. See the Sailing Holidays website to get the background info and then give me a call or e-mail if you’re interested.
That’s pretty much it for now I think – I promise that we won’t wait so long to write the next newsletter (though it may be written from our caravan and downloaded via our mobile phones as we intend to make the most of our new-found freedom). However, another aspect of our life of leisure is that we should be around more to entertain visitors, and so we’d be happy to see anyone who’s passing by or who fancies a few days out in the country.. Just drop us an e-mail and give us a bit of notice and hopefully it’ll all work out. As always, one place you will definitely find us (and loads of other friends) is at the Warwick Folk Festival which is July 25th-27th. See their website for details, and let us know if you plan to come along. Best wishes to all, and hopefully see you somewhere along the way this summer.
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© Copyright Cooke-Shuttleworth Enterprises 2003