Saturday 28 November 2009

Kerfuffle in Concert - Expanding My Cultural Horizon Beyond 'Ark 'Th'Erald Angels...

Advent is a time of tradition. Nobody doubts it and we all participate in it, even if it's the more modern Christmas traditions like spending a full quarter's worth of electricity lighting the outside of your house with a plastic reindeer and the left overs from Blackpool illuminations. Me, I prefer the traditions anchored in the real meaning of Christmas - at least I thought I did.

My heritage, as I've pointed out before, is in the Methodist chapel tradition whose musical repertoire got rather stuck in the Victorian times and the early twentieth century evangelical traditions of Moody and Sankey. I've been missing out.

Last night we went to watch Kerfuffle - a folk/traditional music group/band/ensemble (delete whichever doesn't afford the necessary degree of credibility in your musical world). The total age of the whole band probably added up to less than two of our ages, yet their musical expertise and knowledge of the older traditions of British music is staggering.

Their latest album Lighten the Dark is a collection of traditional songs and carols.

Still awake?

It doesn't sound very exciting does it? But this is where people often fail to understand folk music. Traditional songs are the foundation for whatever the musician builds, and Kerfuffle build a performance of energy and life that doesn't merely lighten the dark but blasts a refreshing shaft of sunlight right through it.

So, I had my cultural horizons expanded beyond the austere walls of the Methodist chapel of my youth to cultural traditions steeped in nature and myth. Still, I was reassured to hear one older member of the crowd say to her friend
"They're alright these modern songs that'th young 'uns do, but I much prefer the traditional ones like 'ark th'erald angels..."

Kerfuffle are on tour. If you fancy a warming, fun Christmas warm-up, that includes a genuine clog dancing knees up don't miss them If you are up our way try the gig at Leeds in Holy Trinity Church.

Find out more here: http://www.kerfuffleonline.co.uk/

Or there's loads of music on their MySpace page here: http://www.myspace.com/kerfufflemusic

And, best of all here's a clip of Hannah James clog dancing in the front room of a hotel during the Sidmouth Folk festival:

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My gran used to wear clogs, but her idea of dancing, bless her, was to do the Slosh after a couple of rum and blacks!


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Wednesday 18 November 2009

Crofty's Christmas Pudding Post

Apparently it's Stir Up Sunday this weekend. This is the Sunday, I'm told, when the family gathers after church to make the family Christmas Pudding ready for December 25th's celebrations.

Forgive me if I sound like all this is news to me. It's only in the last few years, when we've been going to an Anglican church - the state recognised Church of England - that this age old tradition has become apparent. It seems it has a biblical heritage  from a text that reads 'Stir up, Stir up thy people Oh Lord...' or words to that effect.

We were brought up in the more austere Methodist Christian tradition which was a bit sniffy about the fancier imagery and glitz of the liturgical church. You know, the sinful stuff like candles and stained glass windows.

And that stripped down religion, sort of suited the post-cotton mill town of the Seventies. There was neither money nor time for much real home cooking, nor for that matter traditions, the mill workers' culture did away with al ot of that.

Instead mill owners created a network of Working Mens' Clubs for the amusement of the masses; and then in my Gran's case came Mecca Bingo - a blasphemous reference to a holy place for some of Oldham's Muslim residents, but a place of escapism and pilgrimage of a sort, to my Gran and her peers.

But back to Christmas pudding. In our house any recipe that required more than three of four ingredients - like meat, tinned peas and potatoes - was out. The sheer inefficiency of a recipe that required at least ten ingredients and, according to the Stir Up Sunday tradition, four people to stir it, meant it was a non-starter.

No, what could be better than something from the new fangled supermarket that came in its own plastic pudding basin and needed little more than reheating on Christmas Day - and of course the addition of custard (the real stuff made with Birds Custard Powder).

So on Stir Up Sunday I will fulfill my cultural heritage and find something far better to do than spend a whole afternoon combining ten quid's worth of dried fruit and other fancy stuff, followed by eight hours cooking if my research is correct.

Incidentally, when it does come to purchasing our family Christmas Pudding I won't be going to Marks and Spencer nor Waitrose. I find the luxury puddings to have far too little pudding. Being brought up on cheaper food means that pudding for me is the cakey bit so I can't stomach the over-fruity rich versions.

No, my favourite pudding year on year comes from Aldi. And I will still stick to my guns when it comes to the topping of choice. On Christmas Day, if I only have one culinary task (unlikely, I accept) it will be to to make sure no Brandy Butter or Rum Sauce makes it to the Croft table. I will take charge of the proper custard made with Birds Custard powder, about a gallon of the stuff.

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Sunday 15 November 2009

Time Contracts - The Final Week

I said I wasn't going to share anything from my last year's notebook but a couple of entries caught my eye, here's one of them that was timed 4.05am. I've tidied and edited it a bit, and added another line to the end.

Time contracts, it closes in on us until we get so close that our measurement of it changes. Life contracts. From a lifespan of ages - childhood, teenage, adulthood, middle age - but no old age, not this time.
'
Even taking account of the occasions that time takes a breath in with a luxurious yawn: the first day of a two week holiday for example, with the luxury of time to ourselves before us like a blank page, even that, by the end of the first week starts to shrink into days till home, then the last night, and the final scramble of minutes to get on the plane in time.

We have measured time these last months in the gaps between symptoms and diagnosis, between appointments, and between samples and results. More recently time has contracted to the space between visits - friends, relations, and now, nurses and carers.

Sat in the empty hours of darkness tonight I feel time's weight pressing down, as it contracts once more to conversations - will this be the last one? Then to individual words - 'not yet'.

Finally we measure time in the number of tracks on a CD of brass band music. And then in breaths, just breaths.

And then time sighs, as the aching empty void of the future opens before us.

And yet time then contracts again, only this time to close in gently, slowly, to soothe.

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Thursday 12 November 2009

The Power of Stories

The words in yesterday's poignant Remembrance Day service at Westminster Abbey were ripe with meaning and message. They held far less impact though than the diary entries of Cornish tin miner featured on Radio 4 that morning. He was one of a tunnelling team deployed to undermine German trenches during the Great War.
His story had the power to reach inside and speak to individuals - to me - far greater than the Archbishop of Canterbury's exhortations to peace.

On Tuesday I was at a conference where a workshop leader spoke about Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Manchester. He spoke of how people's views on them change when they here the plight that many people arriving in the UK face. 'You just have to hear their stories...',
the workshop leader said. And indeed many of their stories deserve our compassion not derision.

For some years I have kept a notebook, largely to remember things I might write about in the future, but at times it has become something of a personal journal. This time last year we nursed someone very close in the last week of their life, and yesterday I read my notes of that week.

I was both really pleased and deeply moved by the story I had recorded there. Remembering day by day what we had gone through together - the humour and pain - was easier for having the simple practical details laid out before me.

Much of my personal recollections deserve to be shared - not yet though. My point is that the story, in its telling - no matter how great the audience - is both a therapy and a possible source of future comfort for anyone else faced with a similar challenge.

I have recently been helping my friends develop a new website called Experience My Culture (www.experiencemyculture.com), my primary reason for thinking it is such a good idea is that we have such a lot to gain by sharing our stories.

If you consider your own life's events to be not worthy of remembering or recording, think again.

Our stories have the power to change lives and futures.
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Wednesday 4 November 2009

Remember, Remember 5th of November - But Why, Does Anyone Remember?



When we were kids there was a family across the street from my grans with two lads about the same age as me and our kid. They were Irish and Catholic, and different. We kids didn't understand the significance of that difference though so openly and naively asked each other things like what it was like to be a 'Proddy Dog' or what being Catholic meant. We also accepted the rants of Mick's and Rob's dad, sat on the sofa in his string vest shouting at the 70s news watching violence errupt on the streets of Northern Ireland.

But I never understood why their dad wouldn't allow them to come to bonfires or have anything to do with Bonfire night at all, even when he knew Nov 5th was my birthday.

Some things run deep in the veins of cultures, and it does us good to remember from time to time that our own country was once rife with religious persecution so bad that it drove a group of Englishmen to attempt to destroy the very foundation of the country's government by blowing it up in the famed Gunpowder Plot.

There won't be many people thinking about religious persecution on Bonfire Night as they stand around the cheery glow of a fire enjoying homely food treats. The actual traditions of fireworks and food have become so embedded in our culture many people have forgotten the religious bigotry that set it all off. I for one love black peas, potato pie supper and a good piece of Parkin.

Is that just a Northern England thing though - my spell checker has just underlined Parkin, and I'm positive that's how you spell it!

Just in case you need any help with your bonfire food, try this BBC Good Food Page - http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/blog/224-bonfire-night/

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Monday 2 November 2009

How We Do Death

This weekend there was a wealth of death related activity, most of it the ghoulish scare fest type.

But beyond giggling witches begging tricks or treats Autumn also brings another centuries old tradition - the festival of All Souls.

Unlike Halloween, All Souls doesn't portray death as unreal or scary but rather an inevitable part of life's cycle that will affect us all sooner or later.

Our own simple moving act of remembrance at St John the Baptist, focused on the expression of continuing life - the love that helps life go on after our world comes crashing down around our ears when someone we love dies .

I saw awkward gestures from men facing the need to express love physically to a parent - the reaching of a hand, or just a shared look; and I saw children instinctively understanding the rightness of offering simple comfort - a girl of seven or eight trying to stretch her small arms wide enough to reach around her weeping Grandma.

What I took away from the service most of all though was the simple realisation that this final element of life, hard though it is to bear, is a shared one.

In our own packed church I was surprised how many families I knew as neighbours or nodding acquaintances, but who I hadn't realised had been touched by loss. This is a cultural tradition to do with death that reflects its natural place in life - though tough to deal with - rather than the unreal and horrific depictions of Halloween.
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