I had been composing my report on the weekend, only to log in and find that Ian had already posted his summary, which echoed my thoughts pretty exactly!

It was a bit of an experiment, running for three days, but all in all, it mostly worked.

Having gone home early-ish (about 23.30) on Saturday evening, Lady Lanfranc and I scraped ourselves from our pit to get to the Bushel by 09.00 which I had scheduled as the start of the "Breakfast Session". It was a bit lonely until after 10.00 am and the take-up of the pub breakfasts was just four of us! I fear that "All Day Breakfasts" will probably be on the Bushel's Specials board for the next week!

The "indoor campers" just disappeared on Sunday morning! What happened to Harlowpoet? Has he been abducted by the Herts Poetry Society? We demand to know!

Anyway, to add to my longtime motto "Never ring a musician before lunchtime" I will add "Never schedule a session to start before 11.00"!

The "Old Wild Rovers" from deepest Norfolk were a decided asset to the weekend and the mainstay of the Ceilidh. The scratch band worked well without rehearsal and Linda made a pretty good fist of calling, in fact she was ambitious enough to call a bransle (which I understand is pronounced "brawl") thereby giving a whole new meaning to "a pub brawl"!!

Special thanks are due to Mark the landlord and his staff, who coped well with a heterogenous mob of folkies; to Ian, for setting the venue up in the first place and much else; to John Grey, who helped to moderate the sessions; to George Papavgeris for an instructive and entertaining workshop; to Linda for her calling the dances.

Here's hoping that we can repeat the exercise (with a few tweaks to the programme and the arrangements) sometime next year.

Oh, and we raised GBP150 for "Children in Need" in the process!

Thanks to all who came and contributed in one way or another.

Alan