Of Drumming And Dancing

I should be feeling elated.  I was worried about the rehearsal I had organised for this morning.  Among my performing projects is a community band with some exotic dancers.  I never set out to have dancers, but for the past few years they seem to have appeared from who-knows-where at all our performances.  They are sometimes a handy distraction if the band is a little under-rehearsed.  Their strategic use of feathers and beads and often little else has been the cause of alarm and joy since we welcomed them into our midst.  Often the dancers are not the same ones who came before.  They are a Terpsichorean enigma.

People notice the band, but rarely for the music.  Sometimes we perform from a forty-foot tractor-drawn trailer.  As we glide at head level past the crowds out to enjoy a carnival I love to see the responses in the audience.  There is a range of both audience members and responses.  Young lads ogle, older men try not to be caught ogling, particularly if partners are present.  Young women shake their shoulders, shimmying and bobbling in solidarity.  Many times we have seen wives cover husbands' eyes with both hands until we have passed by.  One time we attracted a prolonged tirade from a woman.  As she was screaming something incomprehensible into our percussion groove she had her hands over the faces of two small children in an attempt to stop them witnessing what I assume she thought was our debauchery.  The poor children must have been terrified by a mother who was beside herself with indignation and the fact that they could not see what was going on.  Since that time the local Round Table that organises the carnival has provided us with an armed escort.  I consider a flank of young men dressed in medieval knight outfits and wearing swords to be an armed escort.  It may not be convenient, but we are invited back every year.

For the third year in a row we have also been asked to provide a rhythmic accompaniment for a local charity sporting event.  The community band is quite a different breed of band from all my other projects.  For a start, people take part primarily because they enjoy it as opposed to taking part because they enjoy it and it's a job.  I've run this band for about twelve years, but not once have I known for sure who will turn up for a rehearsal or even a performance until they turn up.  One of my players posted photographs on Facebook a couple of days ago. She posted them from Turkey.  There aren't many places she hasn't visited and we are used to her being on a different continent.  One of the other players is prone to injury.  She is very active and, in her sixties (although I didn't just write that), she has recently achieved black belt status in Tae Kwon Do.  She also likes to ski.  Both activities have left her incapacitated and in plaster from time to time.  Today, she came in limping and unable to raise her arms beyond the height of her elbows.  Another of my loyal and committed players came with both eyes almost closed from hay fever induced swelling.  The Turkish holiday-maker had arrived back in the UK with her body, from neck to hands and feet, covered with itchy, strawberry-red blotches from some unknown allergic reaction.  The rehearsal room at the local sports centre had been booked for us by an officer of the local council who also coordinates this event.  I have copies of all relevant e-mails regarding the arrangements so it was with some surprise that, just after we started our first piece, two burley staff members came to ask what we were doing.  It's not as though I hadn't already had to negotiate the road barrier to get my van-load of instruments round the building or the people barrier that keeps non-payers from going further into the centre than the reception desk.  We weren't "on their screen" and they wanted to know who we were and why we were there.  How amazing it was that I could just walk in with a stack of large percussion instruments and a dozen other people and start playing without being challenged, particularly since we weren't "on their screen".  I may just try that somewhere else ...

I used to rehearse this band weekly, then fortnightly, but owing to the above-mentioned unpredictable attendance I now run rehearsals as required by the project.  At least this is affordable.  We haven't played this music together since last July.  They remembered pretty much everything in the five pieces I planned to rehearse.  I was very worried that I would not have enough players to cover all the parts, but somehow it always comes out okay and today was no different.  I should have been elated and I was for a little while.  Then I came back to the boat and saw Jack.

Of Losing Gems And Marbles

I have set myself a little challenge to write something a few days each week.  This challenge is probably doomed to failure.  I realise that goals are supposed to be specific and given more precise time references.  Whoever made that rule doesn't live in my world.

I didn't realise I have started so many blogs and had so many accounts.  I have often set up something and then made the log-in details so complicated that I have eventually given up trying to access them for a second time.  So it is that I have discovered two other Blogger accounts set up for Marshlander and I have no idea how many e-mail accounts there could be.  I set up another e-mail account this week to link to my new blog site (the other one I set up this week, I mean) and within five minutes had managed to lose the log-in details and am now locked out of it ... until, I suppose I can remember something.  It is to Google's credit that accessing an account for which the password or account name has been forgotten is convoluted and tedious.  I gave up trying to work it out.

I don't consider myself to be entirely scatterbrained.  I can be quite organised and with all the passwords and details required for hundreds of websites these days I have to have a system for keeping them to hand.  Sometimes, though, things get away from me.  I suppose it happens to most of us.  If it doesn't happen to you I am sorry, but we may never be able to be close friends.

I had quite forgotten that one of my blog pages was even linked to Marshlander's Facebook page and I noticed it this morning when checking to see if I could add links to external websites.  This may be why that blog page has only one entry dated August 2012.  This is my explanation for the late appearance of two entries from 2012.  As an aid to myself and to any passing stranger I shall copy old entries into this blog so it may look a little unstable for a few days as I discover old essays and rants.  Then I shall see if it is possible to delete old accounts.  I fear, though, that Google along with Facebook might be forever.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photograph of one of my kingfisher neighbours.  This blurry image is the best my iPhone can manage, until the day that one of the kingfishers sits on my mooring rope, the tiller arm or the prow of the boat when I actually have my phone in my hand.  I'll get a decent photograph one day.

Precrastination

Lots of people make lists.  I make lists.  I like to tick tasks for the joy of scoring a line through an item when I've completed it.  I always considered myself to be an expert procrastinator, but a few months ago I came across the concept of precrastination.  Apparently it is different from procrastination.  Say, for example, I make a list of things to do. Then I do something today that doesn't need to be done until tomorrow in an attempt to put off a rather more urgent task I'd rather not start ... that is precrastination.

I'm currently working on a song.  the working title is "Grey".  Owing to lassitude verging on laziness that is probably the title it will keep forever.  A first draft of the lyrics came to me fairly quickly, in a single day, a Monday if i remember correctly.  However, redrafting, editing, adding a tune, working out a harmonic structure and learning the damned thing are mostly in various states of progress.

I don't need to be writing this diary (apparently I should call it a "blog", which undoubtedly means something special) and I should be working on the song and a few others that I plan to sing tonight.  I really should think about eating something more nourishing than an almost finished packet of dried apricots.  I may make myself a cheese sandwich to which I shall add a few raw and pickled vegetables.

I think the reason I decided on keeping a diary like this is that I shall end up making myself write something.  I believe that unless I practise I don't stand much chance of hitting a mark of any kind.  I think that is what "Grey" is about.  If I sing it tonight, you could hear it on West Norfolk Radio - there's also an "app" - heaven help us - to listen in on your telephone.  As I try to explore in the song, music comes to me more readily than words do.  I really do have many books of incomplete tunes, poems and song lyrics.

In the meantime here's a bit of

"Grey"

Untroubled I am by the burden of genius

I struggle with words to find something to say.

Life putters on - a distraction from boredom,

An attempt to stay solvent and living each day.

I'd like to be original; I know I'm derivative.

I wear my influences on open display

I grew up in colours I liked it that way.

Now I look in the mirror

And only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Make rhythms and colours from sounds that surround me

Watch how the wind shapes the river.

It changes each day.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

I’m thinking in colour, but everything’s grey.

I hear my friends talking like proper songwriters

Of choruses, verses, key changes and all;

Of intros and outros and middle-eight solos,

Of descending bass lines and dominant chords.

I just tell stories or capture a moment

And fool myself it’s my inimitable way.

I imagine the colour in all that I say.

Then I look at the writing and only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Head full of music.  It’s all just the same tune.

The rhythm’s are boring and everything’s in the same key.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

Another creation that nobody needs!

If I get close to finishing something important

I'll go and make supper though cooking’s a chore.

I could be at practice, or even rehearsing,

Or finishing something I started before.

I've books upon books of half-started writing

Or half-finished music that sits in a drawer.

The songs I’ve completed don’t leap off the score

I've started to practise them ten times or more.

Switch on the computer

Download the e-mails and weed out the spam.

Log into a forum,

Post in a thread, show how clever I am.

Share things on Facebook (too much information)

Laying down evidence nobody needs.

One game of Tetris, one hand of Spider

Leaving a legacy nobody reads.

... etc

"Grey" copyright Marshlander

Somewhere out there ...

... is a creature that croaks or rasps and only does it in the morning, some mornings. I don't know what it is yet, but one day I shall find out.  Friends have suggested it is a frog, a snipe, a corncrake ...  My theory this morning is that it is a duck yawning.

I've been living on the river for more than three years now.  I've only just remembered that I had started this blog soon after moving.

Of Van Radios And The Rewards Of Teaching

I am shedding a little tear. A couple of years ago I treated myself to a radio CD player for my van. It has been a rather brilliant piece of kit and I have enjoyed using it. Yesterday I watched as it progressively stopped working throughout the day.  First it wouldn't read the contents of my phone.  Then it couldn't read a compact disc.  Then it stopped charging the phone and by evening it wouldn't even switch on. 

Today I called back in to Halfords from where I bought it to seek advice. I'd rather hoped that something made by Kenwood would last longer than 27 months. The lady on the till called for assistance and a young man approached greeting me by name. I couldn't place him and had to confess so after a while. He said I'd taught him djembe drumming in Year 3 (that must have been at least ten years ago) and he credited me for his interest and engagement with music, which had become very important in his life. It was a lovely acknowledgement, however exaggerated it sounded, and I was a little overwhelmed.  His memory of what we did together was pretty sound, including a performance that I had completely put out of my mind. He now plays in several bands and ensembles and his standard of playing on trombone and guitar has earned him offers on degree courses at the RCM and at Music Tech in London.  He is weighing his options and deciding whether he can afford to further his education in this way. My delight in his joy is tempered by an anger that affordability has to be a consideration at all.  It's a pity he doesn't live in Scotland or Finland or any other country where education  is considered important enough to make it available to all people who want and deserve it.  I was fortunate enough to receive a statutory higher education grant when I was starting out.  I found surviving on that with a young family was tough enough and came close to dropping out when at times we were struggling to find enough money for the week's groceries.  The thought of entering a career with a huge financial debt weighing heavily on the shoulders must truly be daunting.  One of my own children took his higher education in the USA and left university and dental school with astronomical debts well into six figures.   It looks like that is where we are heading in most of the UK.  Whatever Chris decides to do I wish him luck.  

This got me thinking. Much as teaching is a bread and butter option and hard grind (which is one of the reasons I keep it to a minimum these days, preferring to spend my energy indulging my own creative needs) there are still times that I leave a workshop on a high.  Sometimes it is simply the expression on a child's face when they finally "get it".  Sometimes it is the sense of achievement that comes from a truly uplifting ensemble experience.  Sometimes it comes from a child wishing to share a personal moment of musical enlightenment.  Sometimes it is being able to give a child some space to deal with a shattering emotional response to music.  I feel a solemn weight of the privilege in sharing those experiences.

Now I'm thinking about past pupils; the reception child with Asperger's Syndrome who spent the first few years crawling under tables and screaming who, by the time she got to Y6, was so keen and dedicated to achieving in music that her face lit up when I came into the classroom for a music workshop - the joy of her participation in music shone in her singing; or the boy in another school, again with AS, who hated the noise in my workshops when he arrived in Y4. In Y6 he took a lead role in a class composition and at one point was trading 4s in the midst of thirty classmates playing the groove, mostly with djembes, congas and noisy bits of metal.  I think also of some of the adults and teachers I've worked with over the years and whom I've seen grow in musical confidence and skill.  I honestly find it difficult to relate their progress to anything I may have done though.  To me, their achievements have come from their own efforts to acquire knowledge, understanding and skills. If I've done anything at all it would be simply to have opened a gate to a path they have subsequently followed.

Yesterday, a Y4 girl came up to me with the news that she has started work on an "album".

She wanted to show me several sheets of A4 she'd stapled together, each containing the lyrics and illustrations for songs she'd been composing. She showed me four completed songs and has got as far as the title for song number five. There were some intriguing ideas among them, not to mention some beautifully balanced lines in the lyrics. As we sat down in our class circle to set to work I asked her if she would sing one of her songs before we started. She was too shy to sing in front of the class, so I asked her if she would feel braver if I sang a new song I've working on in return.  I had to carry out a quick memory scan to check that the lyrics of the verse and chorus that I could actually remember were appropriate enough not to initiate a crocodile of pitchfork waving parents carrying flaming torches to escort me off the premises!  She agreed to this and sang the first song in her album. Her class mates responded with enthusiastic applause and cheering. Those moments are precious. After her success I was hoping she would forget our agreement, but she turned to me and said, "Now you have to keep your side of the bargain." Priceless!

My children tell me that sometimes they meet their contemporaries and occasionally someone will remember something I did with them twenty or thirty years ago.  Sometimes I am remembered simply because I wore rainbow braces or shoelaces.  I had a teacher in my junior school who changed my life.  His name was Mr Perry.  He encouraged my engagement with music and I shall always be grateful to him.  He offered me options that would otherwise have been unimaginable in our working class family.  Even if I didn't continue with playing the clarinet beyond the Grade 3 through which he took me I ended up returning to the recorder and taking it to diploma level.  A few years ago I tried to find him to thank him face to face and to let him know what he had unleashed.  Sadly I was too late.  He had apparently died a few years previously.  I don't think he would have been more than fifteen years older than me.


Why did Chris' comments affect me so?  For a start I don't think anyone has said anything like that to me before. Maybe my years of going into schools and leading workshops haven't been wasted completely. Not just that, though, he fixed the radio with a new fuse.

Of Boats And Fantasies

I've lived on the river for nearly three-and-a-half years.  I'd entertained a fantasy about living on a narrowboat for a long time.  For several years my favourite time of the year was was always the one week when I would be invited to come and be part of the crew for the "Summer Storyboat".

The Rose of Essex

The Storyboat started out as a project organised by a group of literature-loving teachers and librarians in Hertfordshire some time during the 1980s.  They formed a working committee and hired the county's 72' Youth and Community Services narrowboat, "Belfast" for the week and took to the Grand Union Canal spending the week stopping off at several points between Watford and Bulbourne.  The first year must have been successful, because they repeated the project and it ran for several years.  I think I became involved after the project had already been running for two or three years.  When the committee changed, as invariably happens, and a majority of the fresh members lived and worked on the opposite side of the county the group decided to change waterway.  This was a big decision and I don't think things were ever the same after that.  They found "The Rose of Essex", owned by Essex Youth Service, and we took her along the Rivers Stort and Lee to run the week's activities between Hertford and Waltham Abbey.

My unique role on both routes turned from just leading a bit of community singing to providing musical continuity between performances by some of this country's most gifted authors of children's

In typical pose?

tales, illustrators and storytellers.  I was also quite useful when we needed to divert people away from areas of the site to move heavy equipment about.  I'd start singing and people would come.

The week was hard work - long days, hard on the voice, physically demanding, always having to think on the fly, but so satisfying.  The reward was partly seeing the families that used to turn up at the same riverside patch of green as us.  Sometimes they would follow us along the river and we'd see them several times during the week.  I don't really know where they came from.  The whole process struck me as akin to magic.  The biggest rewards, though, were more personal including actually being on the canals and rivers, seeing a very different-looking world from the water, seeing my first kingfisher in real life, being allowed to "drive" and learning the mysteries of negotiating locks.  Something bit me then and didn't let go.  I think it was a vision that peace was a possibility.

June Counsel

I met some inspiring people and was privileged to work alongside some brilliantly creative minds.  I hope I shall never forget the after-work wind-down at Waltham Abbey one year where June Counsel and Julia Jarman sat in the shade of the hawthorn hedge and decided to weave a story spontaneously.  They didn't do it for an audience, most of whom had gone home for tea anyway, but simply because they could. I don't remember the plot or the characters, but I do remember watching and listening to the twists and turns of their separate imaginations and wondering how they managed to think of such things, seemingly plucking them from the air without faltering.  It was like a game of "let's pretend", but on a far more sophisticated level.

Another performance I found totally absorbing was James Mayhew telling the story of the Firebird.  He spoke very quietly, so we had to draw close.  He had a sketch book on his lap and while he was telling the story he drew a most beautiful illustration of the Firebird ... but from his point of view he was drawing it upside down so we could all see the picture.

The wonderful John Ryan was another regular.  He showed us how he created the early BBC animations for Captain Pugwash from his books.  He always went through the same routine, but I never tired of hearing and watching him.  An absolute gentleman at all times I was really angry when characters with sexualised names became part of popular culture and everyone thought it was him, which it most certainly was not.  I think he was deeply hurt by all the smutty innuendo.  I take every opportunity to defend his honour when anyone brings up those characters whom he never invented and who never appeared in his stories.  I have one of his drawings of Captain Pugwash.  I wish I'd asked him to sign it.

One year on Boxmoor Common, Jan Pienkowski turned up to supervise the painting of a 16'x4' painting on sheets of hardboard.  One of my closest musician friends now, here in the Fens, was a child at the time and was there too, although I didn't know that at the time.

Some encounters were a little offbeat.  When Colin and Jacqui Hawkins turned up one day at Berkhamstead (Colin dressed in full pirate outfit, of course) I seemed to spend most of my spare moments chatting to Jacqui about considerations for choosing schools for children.  I realise that we may have been talking about their daughter, Sally, who is now enjoying a successful acting career.  Errol Lloyd and I worked up a double act.  He would tell his Caribbean stories and I would bring out my West Indian song repertoire.  He'd bring his flute and we'd sing and play "Linstead Market" and "Dis Long Time Girl".  Grace Hallworth, the grandmother of the storyteller revival was another wonderful lady who referred back to her Caribbean culture.  We worked together a few times outside of Storyboat time too.  One or two writers were not really suited to the chaos of the Storyboat routine and one in particular needed "medicinal help" before doing her routine.  It was terribly sad that some people are forced into roles by their publishers for which they are not suited .

I don't think I have ever laughed so much as the time Tony Ross and Andrew Davies shared the community picnic lunch.  Brilliantly funny people.  Some authors expected an annual invitation and were such good value that they received it.  Unfortunately for us, Andrew became much too busy and famous after a while, outgrowing his stories of Marmalade Atkins, but it was certainly fun while it lasted.

I was in awe of Jan Mark.

Jan Mark

Sometimes one meets someone who knows a lot about a few things, or someone who knows a few things about a lot of subjects.  Jan knew a lot of things about a lot of subjects.  I felt like an intellectual toddler in her company.  One of my most treasured possessions is a photocopy of a two-stanza poem she wrote under the shade of a tree when we were moored at Ware one year.

Where?

The Storyboat has berthed at Ware,
The handsome Colin West is thare,
And Robert Leeson bright and fare,
And also I, with windswept hare.
At Ware.

The handsome Colin West

The second stanza followed the same form, but was mainly about me, the mis-spellings being a reference to the spelling of my surname.

Mick Gowar with Robert Leeson, "bright and fare", in repose 

Robert Leeson stayed on The Rose of Essex with the crew one year.  He wanted to research life aboard for a book he was writing in a series called "The Zarnia Experiment".  I don't think he enjoyed it very much, but a year later the fifth book in the sextet, "Hide and Seek" was published and featured every member of the crew under other names.  I became "Sam" who seemed always to be dressed in red t-shirt and rainbow braces and singing the Jan Holdstock song, "Buttercup Farm".  Bob thought the song was traditional, so he quoted it freely throughout the book.  The description of me was pretty accurate for the time though.

I made some friendships on the Storyboat that have lasted; others never really were, have faded or people have passed away.  I still see Mick Gowar and occasionally Rob Lewis.  I met Kevin Crossley-Holland on a train back from London and we talked the whole way back.  I am in contact with the man who first got me involved.  He is a head teacher in Tower Hamlets now.  We first met when I went into his school and ran some music workshops.  He also owns a narrowboat, but hasn't taken the plunge to live afloat.

Mick Gowar liked using my guitar.  He said it had a "fifth gear"

Adrift ...

2011 was one of those years.  P.A., my partner, lost his mother very suddenly.  Two months after that my father died.  I may fill in some of the details later, but because I had to move out of the house we shared for eight years, I have ended up living in a narrowboat mostly moored in a fairly remote part of the Fens.  It is the sort of rural hideaway that, for as long as I can remember, I have imagined I would like to live.  A narrowboat has for a couple of decades been, till now, an unattainable fantasy.

One friend tells me often that it is less trouble to dig a hole and throw money into it than it is to buy a boat, although the effect is much the same.  My nearest boater neighbour says that if you don't like someone, buy them a boat.  He has lived afloat for seven years or more.  I have been here for eight months.  I moved on to the river in December 2011 and, in a very short time, I have experienced every kind of weather the British climate can throw at me including strong gale-force winds, minus eighteen degree temperatures, hail, snow, rain, heat, fog ... is there anything else?  There have been days when I have struggled to keep the temperature inside the boat down to 35 degrees and, of course other days when I have struggled to get the temperature up to something survivable.  My new best friend is my Morso Squirrel stove.  In the colder months it heats the water as well as the boat.  Getting it to cooperate is a work of art.  There have been nights when I have had to put on extra layers of clothing to go to bed, including a hat and bedsocks.  When the river froze it locked the boat in place.  The strangest sound was the accompaniment to the first movement of the day when, before the ice became too thick to allow the boat any movement at all, it would splinter with an eerie cracking sound along the length of the boat.  I had not heard a sound like it before.  That feeling that I was not quite sure what I had just heard reminds me of the time when I was woken up in an earthquake.  An earthquake is a rare occurrence in the Fens.

The Fens are a well-managed drainage system, but the changes in water levels can be disconcerting.  Contrary to intuition the river level can drop dramatically after a heavy rainfall, which has happened often this year.  There have been times when the changes of two to three feet felt almost tidal.  I assume this has been when water has been pumped out of the system in anticipation of an influx of water running into the rivers further inland.  Eventually that water will make it through our waterway on its journey to the sea.  A couple of weeks ago so much water was let out of the river that my boat sat on the bottom.  It listed very disconcertingly.  I am discovering there are a lot of things that are disconcerting when living on a boat. 

However disconcerting life afloat can be, the place where I am moored is beautiful in that dramatic, stark Fenland way.  The sky is huge, changes constantly and reflects in the river.  My nearest neighbours are kingfishers, moorhens and horses.  At night there are two moons - one in the sky and one in the river.  It makes me think of The Dead Moon.  During the day I can look out of my window into my own private aquarium.  I watched two swans sit on their nests for five weeks. The first brood to hatch produced seven cygnets, the second was a family of six.  They are growing rapidly.  The family of six cygnets and two mute parents glide past my boat in proud formations, usually in the early evening.  I am so lucky to be here.  I miss my father.