AS IN THE LONG AGO

This group of ash trees stands beyond the meadow at the end of my garden. The earliest photograph was taken in the mid-1980s when there were six trees. I think the gales of 1987 took the tree on the right away, and in the last few years another tree has been steadily leaning into its neighbour. In the snowy picture you can just make out the roof of a barn between the two trees on the left. That, too, was damaged in 1987 and subsequently demolished.  The ash trees make my garden what it is because of the way they frame the northern landscape with those arches between their trunks. Everyone who walks through the hedge into the back garden exclaims at the view, but it's the trees that turn a straight horizon into a series of windows and draw your eye to the narrow band below the horizon where you can see distant marshes, windmills, churches and villages. You can even see wind turbines flashing in the sunlight a dozen miles away on the coast.  I like to think that I liv...

As it's Red Nose Day here's a banjo joke. A band has arrived early for a gig so they lock up the cars and go in search of a drink, but on the way to the pub the banjo player suddenly stops. 'Hell!' he says, 'I left my banjo in the back of the car where anyone can see it. I'll have to go back and cover it up.' The rest of the band sigh, but they walk back to the car with him. When they turn the corner they see that the rear window has been smashed. The banjoist breaks into a run. When the others catch up they find him staring into the car in astonishment. There is now an extra banjo lying on the back seat!   There are similar jokes about other instruments, especially bagpipes. I like this one. Q: Why do bagpipers walk when they play? A: To get away from the noise.   But back to banjos. All those jokes are really very unfair. A friend of mine once pointed out to me that a banjo player can always draw a crowd, and most of the banjoists I've m...

This photograph shows the great Scottish storyteller, Duncan Williamson on a visit to the small Norfolk school where I was teaching in 1992. Here's a quote from Hugh Lupton about him: It was Duncan who told me that when you tell a story, or sing a song, the person you heard it from is standing behind you. When that person spoke, he, in turn, had a teller behind him, and so on, back and back and back. I love this idea, the story has to speak to its own time, but the teller has also to be true to the chain of voices that inform him or her. You can read more from Hugh Lupton about storytelling here .  I was lucky enough to spend a whole day with Duncan , listening to him telling the children story after story, interspersed with songs and tunes on the harmonica , and I often tell stories that he told that day, hearing his voice in my head. He had a very special way of beginning a story so that you were aware that it was part of that chain of voices. Here's an example from Th...

I'm posting a small corner of one of my bookshelves in honour of World Book Day. Most of the children at the school where I teach dressed up last Friday. They were supposed to be characters from books, but usually these days they're characters from the book of the film, or maybe from the book of the film of the book. It's all very confusing. I did notice that Harry Potter seems to have faded from the scene. The big favourites were Ben10, (looks like the book hasn't appeared yet for that one!), Snow White, Batman, Spiderman , Captain Hook (along with various pirates from the Caribbean), and police officers - which is fair enough when you think how much crime fiction we consume. So: my bookshelf. It's almost a little history of my childhood reading. I loved the Sam Pig stories for a long time. They evoke a vanished rural England which was still just about alive when I was a child. When I read them now I can still recapture the vividness of the experience of ...

Mike died on 22 nd of February. For ten years between 1980 and 1990 I played with him in a band called The Moles , along with Derek Guy and Henry Holzer . It started out as a ceilidh band. We met on Friday evenings at Henry's house to rehearse and chat, and played gigs maybe once a month, but more frequently in the summertime.  In the early years I didn't have a car and Mike would pick me up every Friday in his Morris Traveller. Ellie and Emily always looked forward to his arrival and it usually took at least half an hour's conversation before we were ready to leave.  Mike was a terrific guitarist. He grew up listening to his dad playing all the standards on the guitar, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of those old songs. Sweet Lorraine was a favourite of his dad's. He was brilliant at working out the chords, too, and also at faking it when he wasn't too sure. We called that improvising until Mike came up with a better word - impoverishing!  Sitting on ...

The main part of my teaching job these days is teaching music, and the most important part of that job is teaching singing. I've always sung songs with children, ever since the time when I was a playgroup supervisor in Emily's playgroup, and when I was a class teacher I'd always have my guitar with me so that every day was punctuated by songs.  However, I've never been that confident about my singing voice, and until recently I'd never had any training either in singing, or in teaching it. So, after a couple of years of encouraging singing in my school I had children who loved singing, had a great sense of rhythm and were really musical, and I realized I needed to know how to take them to another level. I also figured out that while I was sitting playing the guitar I couldn't help them to sing. I needed to conduct them.  The result of all that is that when I saw a conducting course advertised in Great Yarmouth with James Davey I thought it was just the thin...