Folk East – a measurement of time
It was the year the Hop Inn was as large as the Cobbold
I ran out of curtains to deck the tent walls
Bike wheel chandeliers hung from the ceiling
Almost foiled, as not fire proofed but
Saved by John who found spray in Beccles.
My Notting Hill curtains found in a charity shop,
saved since the ‘80s, were draped on my dummies,
like two dryad centurions outside the Hop Inn,
their heads, Mischa’s lampshades of painted sunflowers
wild fennel from a roadside in Halesworth their breasts.
It was the year I wore glasses to see the card readers
on bar shift that evening, with a new team
and picked up the pieces of a man charged his pin number
An easy mistake. Trawler Boys was lively, Jackalop popular,
The cellar team magnificent, lifting and spiraling.
Summer Dream my first pint.
It was the year of old friends, like old pairs of shoes
easy to fit with, and dally and dance,
to songs now familiar from the John Ward Trio
that opened the show, after Dean marked 10 years
of Folk East on this land:
She follows the fish, he follows the plough.
Imagine my surprise, after an hour in the Sanctuary,
Listening to voice, harp and flute, feeling easy enough
to stretch out on a pew, when outside a voice said,
Did you like it? It was Tess, her free ticket in.
It was the year I accepted all the forgetting
The name Dudly-Norths, just the taste of lives lived
In Constantinople,
In Archangel and the male dead end
inscribed on their tombs, their story
In Great Glenham church with a useful toilet
for morning emergencies.
It was the year I let go of the life long ambition
to draw or play music. But still I enrolled
with Malcolm Cudmore who taught me to draw
well turned calves on suntanned legs
of men in long shorts, topped with straw hats.
The body, I learn, is 7 heads high, and careful, I’m told
not to make legs too long.
I dallied with a woman with eyes to thread a needle
and taught me to sew flowers on my hat.
I will not potter now, but still I made a sheep,
forcing clay through a sieve – what joy – for it’s coat.
In the cinema bus I watched Lawrence, a friend
talk the birth of the Yoxman, like an ant on a mountain
one step at a time.
It was the year that the statue of a Bristol slave trader
was demolished, that the Yoxman was raised.
Such uncertainty.
As Robert MacFarlane (a shoe I knew of) talked
disintering the things held in the earth,
that Lawrence responded: He looked forward the time
when no one knows who has made it.
Eyes down, not bombastic, not heroic, along the A12.
It was the year of no Dave, but Barry arrived
with Ghan on his arm, his knees stiff with arthritis
his ribs cracked from a fall, he propped up the bars
‘for a 150 an expensive backdrop!’,
I knew he’ll never ver far from a bar.
It was the year of the wasp sting, in the shade of the bus
with Mark, Midnight Mark, remembering Bob,
(long gone and who gave him the name)
As I listened to Marks ills – this may be his last one,
(a motor bike beckons), the wasp bit.
‘Id better take off, i’m allergic to bee stings’
‘But a wasp sting is different, said Bob, the First Responder,
whose autobiography was words far too long
‘After shot, and stabbed and was it hijacked?’
Keep it short, ‘Still Standing’. He agreed.
It was the year I camped safe, the same place as before
Under the great linden, with seeds like antennae
that peel from its propella, I noticed and drew,
in my promising sketchbook, of otherwise legs,
as the cows in the paddock sort shade under oaks
and the oak I once drew stands bizarrely stark naked
bleached by the sun.
I remembered the cover of Fog on the Tyne,
The type face used by Lindisfarn,
I felt the time passing, as they sang protest songs
I knew nothing of then, and something now,
Fifty years later.
There were many late greats including Alan Hull
whose son in law sang like a canary.
And then they fell silent inviting our chant
Cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine all mine.
Fog on the Tyne’s all mine.
Back to the Linden, I walked that last evening
to my van with it’s single bed, glass of red waiting
my note book and pen to write out these lines
of a time at Folk East, a moment in life.
August 2023
Kalikellett 