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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Only Women Allowed


I am looking after an old, arthritic, memory deficient dog while his owners, two members of an all-woman band called “Meet Your Feet” https://www.facebook.com/MeetYourFeet , and their roadie, Thelma, go to play the headline spot at the “Women In Tune” http://www.womenintune.co.uk/ festival near Lampeter.  The two are our old friends Heie and Fanny, and we have shared many interesting  and funny episodes with them in the last 10 years.
The first and funniest was when Heie and Thelma were working together in Bristol. They had become good friends and Thelma suggested they should meet up together with partners. Heie looked a bit sheepish and said “You do know my partner is a woman?”
“Well, I guessed she might be” (Even Thelma, famously oblivious to sexual nuances, could tell that Heie was no babe)
Heie relaxed, and with her trademark twinkle, and in her lilting German accent said:
“It’s funny you know, you have your Dick and I have my Fanny”
That cemented their friendship in the way that John Slater had endeared himself to me when we first met by not knowing how to put his Land Rover into 4 wheel drive.
We were the only non-family heterosexual s at their wedding and felt very privileged to be there. I sometimes tease them about male female differences  and can’t help feeling sometimes that my maleness is only tolerated, but then I remember that they don’t really feel comfortable in all-lesbian or in any all-homosexual  company and have very mixed feelings  about Women In Tune. It’s OK for them to criticise it but wouldn’t want outsiders to do so. They felt it had a really important function in giving hundreds of women who don’t easily fit into straight society a chance to really be themselves  where they felt safe and accepted.  It reminded me a bit of the main purpose of the Welsh Language festival  “Gwyl Bro Dinefwr” http://www.menterbrodinefwr.org/#/gwyl-bro-dinefwr/4564804921  – a chance to spend a whole evening speaking your native language and singing along to the band lyrics.
I too have mixed feelings about the WIT festival, because I had a close friendship with one of its founders, Heather Summers. She is an adventurous violin player and joined my experimental music group “Sound Waves” during its short and unsuccessful history. She gave me a lot of moral support in what was a doomed venture, but she won’t let me go to Women in Tune because I am male.
Another occasion which could have been embarrassingly funny was when Fanny and I planned to go to a jazz gig in Bristol. Ian Storror is the former landlord of the famous Albert jazz pub in Bedminster where Andy Shepherd cut his teeth, and one of the most dedicated jazz promoters I know.  He had been running Sunday night gigs in the most unlikely surroundings of a big new chain hotel in the centre. I had been to several memorable (and several to be forgotten) concerts in the hushed and carpeted basement in the glass and concrete environment of the new Cabot Circus, and was looking forward with some apprehension to going there with Fanny. In the end she cried off sick and I never faced the problem of how to introduce her to Ian. How couples called Richard and Francis cope I don’t know.
Heie gave me long instructions about Sam’s foibles and how he needed looking after. It sounded like a big chore, but actually I enjoyed it. It’s a long time since I had that particular discipline – looking after someone by guesswork and body language.  I used to so much enjoy the way Flash (our previous dog)and I communicated by signs and gestures. Sam seems very distant at first. He ignores me most of the time and seems to wander about aimlessly, but after a while I could see a pattern. He wanted to go to the front of the house and then up the lane, and I think that was looking for the others, last seen getting into the car. He preferred to me near me rather than on his own. Once we had established some sort of pattern he went to sleep. We both followed his meal routine to the letter and that reassured him. Out walking he had none of the eagerness of a young dog, but still preferred going to coming back, and enjoyed checking out the smells.
I went to bed feeling I had done something worthwhile, but sleep was fitful because I knew he was likely to need to go out again around the time I expected them back – 1am. I had several dream versions of the car arriving in deep darkness, one of them with Carol Stenning driving.  In the end I woke for a pee at about 1.30 and found them sitting round the table full of adrenaline from a successful gig. They were laughing about the way some of the women had stripped to their bras and bounced around in front of the stage – “you would have liked that Dick”. By then I had joined them for a beer and it was like going back to the early days of the Small Nations Festival  when the whole family would congregate round the table at Felin Maestwynog in the early hours of Monday enjoying the release of tension at the end of three days of excitement and stress. Thelma remembered earlier times when we had bands staying with us after their gigs – particularly she remembers Niominkabi the African reggae band all sitting round smoking individual spliffs and talking about football.