18th of April
Last weekend was the Glenfarg Folk Feast a great music festival in the hills just south of Perth where many of my ancestors lived and rellies still do. I was booked to run a DADGAD guitar workshop and here are my victims. This is the Terrace Bar of the Glenfarg Hotel where the Glenfarg folk club meet every Monday night. It’s a truly great club with some marvellous local singers and musicians.
I was performing in the Saturday night concert here in the village hall where I recorded Live In Glenfarg several years ago. On stage for a sound check are the Farg Folk a group of commitee members who did a wonderful set of singalong songs to open the show.
The winner of the Glenfarg World Puff a Box competition heads back triumphantly to his seat. He had just blown the inside of an empty box of Scottish Bluebell matches further than any one else without it falling out of bounds or hitting the pesky chandalier.
I am a former world champion at this event and actually produced the longest puff this year but it fell out of bounds – DOH! This is me recoiling from the puff… with somewhat demonic eyes…
Last day of the Easter Hols and a family trip to Edinburgh. Here looking down the Royal Mile with the Firth of Forth in the Background.
The father of modern capitalism, Adam smith who described the “invsible hand” of the market on all human commerce. His ‘Wealth of Nations’ has become a real right wing icon but his more philanthropic writings have been largely ignored. Behind him stands St Giles Catherdal Scotlands most important intact medieval building.
The Heart of Midlothian stone. Mentioned in my song the Flowers of Edinburgh, It marks where the old jail used to stand, immotalised in Sir Walter Scott’s novel. It was traditional to spit on the stone as a gesture againt the cruelty of the establishment. Later a football team was named after it and it became traditional for its supporters to spit on it for good luck. As Hearts had just beaten Celtic to reach the Scottish cup final these gobs had clearly worked!
The Old Town in Edinburgh is famous for its closes, narrow alley-ways which run down from the main street at right angles. The gap between each close was only one house wide and the dwellings were built higher and higher until many were as high as twelve stories -the highest at that time in the entire world.
There are a large number of these closes with many,many tales attached to the hundreds of years they have been inhabited. The main reason that so many people huddled in these medieval tenements was that no one wanted to live outside the imposing city wall in a period when there were frequent attacks from the English.
We were in Edinburgh to visit Mary Kings Close. When the Council Offices were built in the late ninteen hundreds they built over the top of a number of medieval buildings which are now preserved as a tourist attraction to let people see how what it was like in Edinburgh hundreds of years ago, in the time of plagues and zero sanitation. No photography is allowed and its all a bit spooky underground, with lots of ghost stories.
You can see Rabbie right behind the blue upright saying ‘food served all day’.
‘Busk Busk Bonnie Lassie’.. this part of Edinburgh is famous for street performers. I used to busk here myself back in the skint old days… The blue object is a police box, the Edinburgh version of the Tardis from Dr Who. To the extreme right is a young lady dressed in black trying to drum up trade for some ghost tour.
