The Churchfitters

When one is invited to a musical event at the Garboldisham Village Hall (and if one is me, which might be even less of a shared experience), one might be forgiven for wondering if one is in for a long, long, evening. I left Seattle last month with just such an invitation in hand, fresh from experiencing The. Worst. Live. Band. In. Seattle – possibly in all creation, so I may have been more concerned than I would have been otherwise.

Carolyn White, John Thurgood and I arrived in Garboldisham at a quarter to seven on a Saturday night in late January, and had no problem finding good seats towards the front of the hall. In fact there were so few people in evidence that we feared the acts would be playing to a sparse audience. We soon learned we had arrived an hour early due to misinformation in the local paper, and by a quarter to eight, every seat had been claimed, and the bar was doing a good business in Old Chimneys Ale, a local brew.

The opening band was a husband-and-wife duo at least the equal of T.W.L.B.I.S. They sang original but indifferently-composed-and-written songs, and while she could sing and he could play, she was so enamored of her own style and so in her own head during her performance that she did sing-along numbers flourished up with her own vocal meanderings that had the audience totally unsure where to go next. Good singers have rapport with the people they’re singing to; this woman, despite having a lovely voice, was not a good singer, in my opinion, at least as humble as the one in paragraph one. By the time they’d left the stage I had grown even more concerned with what I was going to hear for the next 90 minutes.

But history is not prophecy, and neither is the quality of the first act. The Churchfitters had me in the palms of their hands from the opening chords of the opening number. The spine of their music sounds like very solid and proficient Irish trad, but onto that they build every possible rock-blues-folk sound and more, including a bit of Breton flavor, and playing a staggering number of instruments, including hand-built bass viols and bass guitars created by Boris, the bass player, who might have come straight from an audition for an Addams Family revival.

The degree of sheer musicianship would have been impressive by itself, but the band is also practiced and tight and innovative and original and FUN. Though becoming better known all the time in the UK and France, they are not a worldwide phenomenon…yet.

The astounding live experience of The Churchfitters is not to be replicated in an audio-only medium, so have a butcher's at this. You can also listen to a wide variety of album tracks on their website, and if that prompts you to buy a CD and tell a friend, so much the better. On the way out the door I told Boris, “I’d go around the world to see you guys again.” I hope their fame grows and grows, so I won’t have to travel quite that far.

Return to Elysium

Above: Size really, really doesn't matter.

Some of you may remember my fond tales of the Elysee Hotel in Bayswater and its two-person lift (luggage not included). Believe me, you haven’t heard them all, but that’s as it should be. Suffice it to say those anchors are still in place, and I remain quite fond of it, even though they enlarged the lift.

Ye olde Elysee been somewhat modernized since my last visit, with wireless access in the public areas, and the addition of some tiny garret rooms on the fourth (fifth) floor. I booked one of these “compact singles,” expecting it to be a hole in the wall into which I could insert myself and my bags, and to my delight it turned out to be a charming and nicely-appointed little space with a nice view of the street, where a light snow is falling. There’s a TV on the wall at the foot of the bed, and they’ve even managed to find space for a desk. The bathroom is predictably tiny, but quite nice. After living 12 months in a 6x12x10, this roughly 8x7x7 space seems quite livable, at least for three days.

Last night I walked out and bought a supper to eat in my room. I passed places I’d eaten and shopped and done my laundry in, and in the process reminded myself how much I sometimes miss dear old London. That said, I’ll be happy to get back to my life and my people and my projects, none of which are here.

I’ll be off with Dev Agarwal and Terri Trimble tonight, to the streets around Waterloo Station, to find a good curry.

This is Your Brain in Leicester

Leicester used to be the place from which I caught a train to Hinckley. I spent so much time in Hinckley during 2008 that I developed a fondness not only for that place and its wide variety of cheap curries, but for the unprepossessing railway platforms of Leicester. One incident in particular stands out: I had just come on a Sunday night from enjoying a leisurely coach journey from Hinckley, necessitated by engineering works on the railway. The journey was so leisurely, in fact, that when I arrived on the platform I’d missed the last train to London.

I remember well the compassion of the Midland Mainline employee as she regarded me with head cocked in disbelief: “The LAST train to LONDON left TEN MINUTES AGO!” as if I alone in all the land had not memorized the timetable. I had to find a hotel room.

Now in those days I was living in London on £400 a month, something many people, including my friends at Her Majesty’s Customs and Immigration, thought was impossible. And I was living well, eating three meals and a TV time snack in a comfy room in a nice neighborhood. But even with what help my loved ones could give, the travel demands of my training were hard on the budget. Rent included utilities, so everything I had left after the landlady came around on Monday for 80% of my weekly budget was divided into a) food and b) everything else. Everything else often included a monthly rail journey to Hinckley for my Master Practitioner training.

So when I found myself facing taking the cost of a Leicester hotel room out of the bank, you might imagine my dismay. A lovely taxi driver drove me to a hotel quite near the rail station, where I negotiated a rate that made me feel a little better, and all was well, as usually happens, does it not?

So now Salad’s trainings are being held in Leicester, where I was for the past week. I had no internet connection worthy of the name, hence the lateness of this post. So I’ll say that Leicester was a great place to spend a week, that Carluccio’s and Mem’Saab offer a great menu for the price, and that the U.S. needs more pie shops. I ate most of my lunches and a couple of dinners from Urban Pie, and a fellow delegate, seeing me tuck in to my pie and mash, said “Oh, that’s so ENGLISH!” And so it was. And so was she; I was the only Yank in the room aside from our trainer.

Christina Hall has got to be one of the most amazing trainers in the world, and that sentiment was echoed by several delegates who had taken NLP trainer training with others at the top of the field, including from Bandler and Grinder themselves. The training was spectacular. When she’s through with me in July I ought to be able to teach any subject with a lot more skill and a lot more understanding of the learning process; when this is done I may actually have earned my “Jedi Master” title. I made new friends and continued old friendships, and made new understandings from previously-acquired knowledge, and ate lots of pies and mash. What else could one ask?