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.