Before I lived in the caravan I once sat on Paul and Rebecca’s carpet in a dark oil painting night among music stands and paper score while the Gypsy Band rehearsed. Hats and pipes and fiddle bows flicked in firelight and shadow, and feet beat out old fast rhythms spinning time and music and spirit.
There are many musicians round here, they play in secret rooms and fiddledy pubs or loud crashing ones.
I met Christine in August when we were both on a course learning Welsh. On the last day she played the violin and sang with a clear voice that crossed centuries and stayed with me for hours. This week she came by the oil lamp caravan with Ceri, for tea and flapjack on their way to the gig where later we watched them perform on a red shabby stage. They wove Welsh with English, fiddle with pipes and told tales of bards and wolves. Music and poetry whirled and pulsed, feet beat old rhythms on wood, a tweed jacket was slung on a chair.
We went home on the bus with music in our heads and listened to the rhythm of the stream.
Your writing gets betterer and betterer–what a lovely picture you painted with words–it recalls an evening I spent in a pub in Somerset –the music stayed inside me for days Rx
You just can’t beat songs about Bards and Wolves, preferable in the same song. I must write one.
Agree with Naycherman. The drawing is good too.
Wish I’d been there with my banjo.
[…] chris had made a plan to stop off at a friend of hers living off the grid, under the radar, in a caravan (an invisible caravan, yellow on the inside) somewhere near machynlleth. they had been studying welsh together last summer, and she was busy writing a book about her rambles along the coast of wales. we sat in the tiny caravan and had tea and i told her fancifully of wolves. she told me the name of the stream which ran noisily and ceaselessly past the caravan, and it reminded me of a sixth century poem called yscolan, which i recited for her. she caught a bus to the gig at theatr fach (and home after) and wrote this: https://theyellowcaravan.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/fiddlesticks/ […]
wow, you just made my head tilt slightly to the side as i vanished off into the world you created with your words. Thank you.
Thank you!