Monday 6 August 2007

Halifax, late
This morning started strangely, as I came downstairs in the Sherbrooke telephone exchange to find a teapot, two boxes that kettles had come in, but no kettle. Not even a saucepan to boil water in. And I had some fantastic tea with me, that Yola had given me in Shelborne a week ago. How frustrating. So once DG came to get me, he took me to the cafe on the main street for breakfast and we sat in the shade and pretended to be on holiday. Marlys and Chris had left for Lunenburg very early.

After a three hour drive along the coast, with some of the best views of the week, we had time to drop in at DG's place in Halifax to see Kate and Owen on the way to Port Williams. Owen's balloon modeling skills are quite spectacular: he had produced a macaw in the course of the morning, and he also showed me how to unicycle with handlebars on a separate wheel, which is really funny, like riding a bike with the frame missing. When I get home on Wednesday I should be taking delivery of a Dahon folding bike, but I don't think it will be quite like this ...

In Port Williams, Chris played his tune The Flower of Port Williams in the village for the first time, which was quite an event in itself, as the tune is an elegy for his mother who grew up there. A few damp eyes in the church then, some of them on stage.

In the interval I was talking to some audients who'd been at our August 2004 concert with Suzie in Halifax, and had witnessed Chris and me giving DG scores out of 10 for his fiddle solo using the hymn board numbers we found in the vestry (see here and scroll down for photo). Well, tonight, Kirsty had come along to hear us and be our angel roadie, so we took the process a bit further this time, and with some

creative use of the words used to describe which Sunday it is in the Anglican church year, she sent us a variety of helpful messages from the balcony during the second half. We'd run the McGibbon sonata in imitation of Corelli into the Arses set to make The Gibbon's Arse, which prompted the brilliant piece of linguistic invention below. It's just as well the audience were laughing at the silly bits in the music, as I was corpsed completely.

As I was standing on the steps of the church afterwards in the dark, somebody handed me a plastic tumbler, which I assumed had some water in it. Then I sniffed it and found it was Caol Ila. I was very happy. Time for farewells to Chris, and off we went to Halifax with smoked salmon on pumpernickel sandwiches. A roadie from heaven indeed.