Seems to be working now, Lizzie.

Thanks all for your kind comments, including those on the Chipfest thread. It was certainly a brilliant weekend for us, and a fitting climax to our careers as a festival duo. We do have a few more club gigs, Beverley, St Neots, Faversham, Islington (thanks Diane) and Kingswinford 22-26 June, and I have solo gigs until Gainsborough on July 17, including Cleckheaton and Spratton Festivals.

It was fortuitous that over the weekend I managed to bump into a huge number of my friends (singers, players, organisers and listeners from every corner of the folk world) who wished me well and said kind things about That Infamous Article - about which I was specially relieved to get support from some Very Senior People).

It's almost easier to count the key people I didn't see! Sorry to have had only the briefest word with Brian Peters (excellent workshop with the utterly wonderful George P, thanks Brian) and to have merely passed Jonny and Vicky on the M6 somewhere, but the number of people who've become important to me who I saw last weekend was almost spoooooky in its approaching-completeness. (Thanks for coming to Chesterfield; Muppitz and Jools xx). Heck, even Perry with whom I worked my passage to New Zealand in 1973 turned up!

And the one person (that I know of :-) who feels, probably correctly, I'm a loose cannon in the folk world, even had the tact to absent himself during our sets! (Thank you, Sir - you know who you are).

My apologies for loosing it at the finish. I always choke up when introducing Turn and Face the Wind (which is why Tom always sings it) but then so would anyone who knows the full story behind Sacha's miraculous escape. Knowing it was the last time we'd sing it together on a big stage was bad enough, but the real killer was that I'd also been about to thank Craig Morgan Robson for singing Crossing the Bar for me.

I feel I should explain why I'd requested it. When, last summer, I was mistakenly but in good faith diagnosed with a terminal illness and given just a few weeks to live, and had that most difficult of conversations about funeral plans with me wife, it was CMR singing Crossing the Bar that I most hoped she might want to have as I slid behind the blue curtains. In those dark days that song was with me most of the time, and I'd thought I'd never hear them sing it again in this life, so sitting cross-legged at the back of the hall, as those sublime harmonies on that magnificent tune, with Tennyson's haunting words so perfectly sung, I had been silently sobbing my little heart out! (To make matters worse, Damo and Mike did The Joy of Living, which was my other choice!)

So I hope you'll forgive me if my voice cracked a little at the moment I least wanted it too.

So many other things happened... Mavis supplying the name of Mary Prout's husband (and yes, he could even have been Rhoda's father!), and such wonderful music from the other guests - golly how good are Flossy and Keith getting?!

Sorry - enough. I'll put the rest in my next blog!

Tom

PS On a lighter note: THE PIE POEM IS FINALLY ON YOUTUBE (with captions) - follow Lizzie's link.