Even before I had a work-permit, the Lovely Miss Lizzy had booked the last weekend in July on my calendar. Her dad Roger, a dyed in the wool folkie from wayback, was turning A Significant Number and decided, rather than a party, that he would host his very own folk festival in their wee village in Dorset, and would I please come along?
Would I ever!
The weekend started out just like an Enid Blyton adventure - when curious work chums asked where I was headed, all I knew was 'my friend's parents house in a tiny village somewhere in Dorset'.
Lizzy turned up fortified with provisions for the drive down (cold sausages, pork pies, and some sugar snap peas as a token nod to Lizzy's new gym membership) and we slung instruments and overnight bags into her car, pausing briefly to admire the view in Salisbury and stopping to gather booze at the nearest late night stupormarket, whiling away the hours nattering like a pair of girls gettting ready for a sleepover.
Actually, as I was staying in Lizzy's old bedroom, it was JUST like a sleepover. People whose parents still live in the 'family home' have the most fascinating personal spaces - it's quite mesmerising to be installed amongst all the relics of someone's life: old treasures still highly prized, recent castoffs. And in Lizzy's case, a superhigh single bed with a tiny window set into the sloping roof that looks over the main street of the village.
Milborn St Andrews is the kind of place where kids grow up rambling over fields, and learning to ceilidh dance. There is one shop and one pub. It was gorgeous!
Roger's birthday celebrations kicked off that very evening, with a quick bite of supper before heading down to the (one) pub for a music session. There was something strange-yet-familiar about hearing folk songs I've learned in Oxford repeated miles away as part of someone else's musical tradition, some verses slightly altered or omitted all together, choruses sung to slightly different harmonies. And one bloke sang a song that I know for a fact was written by my oxford drinking chum, Ian Woods. Then there were a whole lot that I'd never heard... I have so much to learn!!
Seeing Lizzy catch up with old friends from school continued the strange-but-familiar theme; it was like going home to my cousins' old stomping ground in the Gippsland district, three hours from Melbourne. Familiar stories even though the faces were of strangers, people I didn't know, but might have heard tales about, and who all made me feel very welcome, just because I was a friend of a friend and had 'come all this way, to Milborne'.
Music sessions followed on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, with a ceilidh (I was asked to sing in a break - eek! and yippee!) and supper on the Saturday night in the village hall. Astoundingly, in all those hours of music, I never heard the same song twice...
Roger is the most remarkable cook. His supper and Sunday-tea tables read like a Blyton novel too - scones with home made preserves, pork pie, mushroom quiches, Dundee cake and things I don't even rightly remember the names of. I was sent home with fresh eggs and home grown raspberries tucked into my bag, feeling rather spoilt.
Roger had so much fun he wants to do it all again next year. I think that's a cracking idea.
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