Dulcie Domum? Moi!?

The following is not from Facebook but from one of my letters to Paula; and then used in Chateau Midden Monthlies which I sent to various friends and family, before Ferretfingers’ broken ankle and the worldwide unpleasantness led to these daily (almost) blogs.

13 June 2018

Last night Mrs Leftfoot and I had one of our monthly trips out:  this time to a concert at the Lit & Phil.   

It was a fundraiser for the restoration of a huge portrait of John Buddle (google him alternately ask Fester and he will bore you about him for hours).   

The band comprised Dulcima (who I gave Phil’s most treasured dulcimer to a few years ago) and an Australian/ Tazmanian couple called Bushby.   

“Music from Three Continents” being Australia, America and Europe.  Dulcimer, harp, guitar, cittern, whistles and a surprising variety of bagpipes (I lost count).  Very civilized, quite folkie and we saw a couple of people we knew. 

Walking back to the car a girl wearing culottes overtook us.

“Oh” I said “you don’t often see culottes these days.  We wore culottes in New Tyne Morris back in the 80s.  God forbid women should wear trousers to dance, even in a mixed morris team.  They were black needle-cord.   

I made them myself.  I must have used my flatmate’s sewing machine.  And the deckchair material waistcoat.  I’ve probably still got the culottes’ pattern somewhere.”

“You would” says Mrs Leftfoot “Tell me, who was in the Dancing Deckchairs, apart from our mutual friend.”

“Well there was a couple from down south, who went back, and Rhys Prichard …”

“Don’t know him”

“... and his wife, she died a few years ago ….. <<name redacted>> who I went out with” pause to hawk and spit at that memory “Oh yes Jay Roundhead, a friend of Bess Cavalier’s.  Oh you know - the usual lot of folkies, re-enactors and similar types ….. 

Oh and Ralph who played the melodeon.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Ralph?  Tall, skinny, Scottish, couldn’t play and talk at the same time, looked gormless whilst playing and slightly less gormless when he wasn’t playing.  He became a vegetarian but didn’t research it properly and ended up in hospital with malnutrition.”

“The things you come out with!”

“I know.  It gets more like Victoria Wood every day.  Mind you ever since I told Mrs Eft I needed braces to hold up my dance skirt as recommended by my friend Mrs Quilt the quilter, I’ve felt as if I was living in a Posy Simmonds cartoon.”

And with that I shall close and get on with a draft press release for Woodlawn School’s Centenary Summer Fair, where I shall be wearing a Cullercoats Fishwife costume borrowed from the said Mrs Quilt.