Unhistoric narrowboating

The weather is looking good for Easter weekend, which is nice because we’re taking Herbie to the Historic Narrowboat club gathering at Foxton.  Chertsey Jim persuaded us some months ago to come along and do a bit of busking to entertain the throng.  I’m a bit wary of parking Herbie amongst all the “proper boats”. I guess they’ll all have notices on them saying when they were built and what cargoes they carried over what route etc.  I’m very tempted to make up such a notice for Herbie saying she is the historic narrowboat of the future and describing her vintage Sherpa van engine and explaining she was built to carry a cargo of old fogies from pub to pub. Actually we’ll be about as near as we can get to the place where her shell was built – just round the corner at Debdale wharf, so we might not be historic but at least we’ll be local.

As to the busking, who knows how that will turn out.  I did some busking years ago at the Spalding tulip festival and we learned that the trick is to play in short bursts so that the onlookers move on every few minutes.  That way you can repeat the good tunes more often.

Yesterday Kath and I  played, along with the rest of our not very supergroup For Pete’s Sake at Winchester Guildhall in front of a crowd of about 500 people.  That might sound very grand until I tell you that half the audience was made up of the rest of the performers at the concert as there were three community choirs on the bill.  Then when I tell you that we were on at 3pm and the concert lasted until 9.30 pm, you can see how far down the bill we were!  Still, we just about got away with it which was a relief.  The do was a memorial for our friend and manic choir leader and singer Sarah Morgan who one or two of you might have heard of as part of the highly regarded Craig Morgan Robson trio and various other earlier singing groups.  We performed with Sarah on one or two occasions and as I pointed out, our band collectively had known Sarah for two hundred years.  We are promised photos of us on stage later this week.  If any of them don’t make us look too awful I may post one here.