Just back from Australia, where I had two such moments, Jerry:

The first was on 18th December at the Almost Acoustic club in Sydney, where the capacity crowd (it was their Christmas "do"), primed by the meticulous Margaret Walters (who had distributed slips of paper with the words to my most convoluted choruses on every table), joined in each and every song I sang with gust and tasteful harmonies. With some 150 people in the room, the wall of sound coming back at me was one of the most heartening experiences in my brief performing career and cancelled any jetlag feeling (I'd landed in Canberra 36 hours earlier and had driven to Sydney that morning).

Afterwards, among the may who approached me for thanks and congratulations was a pretty young lady with her equally young mum, who baught all 5 of my albums and enquired about further performances; and when I told them I would play in Brisbane 4 days later, they promised to be there.

The second was at the Brisbane gig with Cloudstreet. The audience was smaller - no club event, this concert had been hastily organised to take advantage of my trip there, and it was 3 nights before Christmas - but filled the room nevertheless and I was having fun, simply because John and Nicole (Cloudstreet) were there, as we'd become friends last year when they toured the UK. But then, from the first song....

.... I noticed 4 voices standing out in singing passionately all the choruses, right next to me. You guessed it - it was the young lady with her mum, accompanied by her younger sister and a gentleman who turned out to be mum's brother, the girls' uncle. All four were singing, with their eyes closed; and during my "Without you on Christmas Day" tear-jerker about missing dead relatives, the four hugged each other and cried. I guessed right there that there must have been a recent bereavement (the absent father? a granny?) in the family, and I felt - well, like a priest conducting a service with those four as my congregation. Weird but oh, so wonderful. So I choked along with them a little in the last verse. And everyone knew it was OK to do so.

Funny the link between these two events: The first was wonderful because it touched the whole roomful - the second because it touched those four individuals.

I've sung in front of an audience of 6 in the past, and no doubt I will do so again (and fewer) in these declining days of folk clubs in the UK. But I will gladly sing to a single individual, when they are responding in such ways.