There's a lot to be said for trying a few experiments when you're at the National. With a zillion or so musical delights on offer from Thursday evening to Monday evening it's never going to be easy to catch everything. Besides, there were so many highlights that I knew in advance would be highlights - many of them have been mentioned in this thread - that the annual challenge of squeezing them all in failed as usual. Another excellent but frustrating National in that respect.

By Sunday, my brain (and the rest of my head) was hurting from having so much choice, so I handed over the decision making to a friend for a few hours. 'Our' surprise decision was to go to Duncan Smith's Shape Note Singing workshop on Sunday afternoon and I'd like to give it a really big thumbs-up. I'd met Duncan earlier in the week when he was giving one of the National Folk School classes (accompanying the fiddle on keyboards) and he seemed a perfectly normal sort of bloke! But he had the knack of making this Shape Note caper downright scary, with instant room-filling harmonies coming out of a bunch of people who didn't even know the songs five minutes earlier.

I recommend it thoroughly for clearing the sinuses and de-fogging the brain. And the Festival scheduled the workshop at a reasonable hour of the day.

You serious singers might know all about that Sacred Harp stuff but I spend most of my time trying to hide behind stringed instruments, so it was quite a "revelation" to me (sorry!)

Bruce