Jacey Bedford's Journal

Had two Artisan rehearsals this week. Feeling pretty pleased because we nailed a new song: The Weatherman. We've done plenty of global warming songs in the past - this is a bit of a climate-skeptic one. Written by BB, of course, so more words to the inch than your average Gilbert and Sullivan patter song with lines like: 'Better buy a parasol for the garden gnome' sung lickety-split or in this case lickety-spit.
:-)

Need some help with picking the best pics for posters and flyers for the summer tour. There are 8 new 2010 photos posted on my facebook group for 'Artisan Harmony Singing Trio'. if you felt like dropping by and telling me which ones you think are most user-friendly for promo purposes, I'd welcome opinions:
http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=132588464796&view=all
Still trying to decide which to use. When I'm actually on them I cease to be objective because I usually hate them all.

This is one:

More of the photos from the boathouse landing dock.

Your turn...

Known locally as 'The Castles,' Kells in Co. Kilkenny is actually an Augustinian Priory dating back to 1193. It was built by Geoffrey FitzRobert - a knight of the historically impressive William Marshall - and established by four Canons Regular (Augustinian 'Black' Canons) brought over from Bodmin in Cornwall. It stands on the King's River.



What's so fascinating about it now is that there are no turnstiles or guidebooks, no barriers (other than safety ones where some restoration is taking place) and no times of opening and closing. You just park up by a derelict Hutchinson's Mill (water wheel still evident), walk for a few hundred yards along the river and cross a bridge and you're there.



It's a huge site with no complete buildings but solid ruins and a restored perimeter wall which enclosed the Burgess Court, a defensive area for the protection of the locals added in the 15th century when times were turbulent and the original defensive castle at Kells had been ignored for some years by successive authorities.



All this I later gleaned from the Kells website because all you can see there is an inexplicable ruin - which is kinda nice. (But don't go to this website unless you can stomach irritating pop-up ads and awkwardly repeating chunks of text. You have been warned.)

Edit: Actually - I just found a much better website here by Daniel Tietzsch-Tyler (an illustrator specialising in archaeological reconstruction) with an extensive history, plans of the site and photographs. I thoroughly recommend it. In particular there's a very fine reconstruction drawing and a ground plan.



And this is my favourite shot.



Just down the road is another mill which is now converted into a museum, tea-shop and offices. It's labelled Kells Priory Mill, but it's the old Mullins Mill. Records say that a mill was established on site in 1204-6 by Geoffrey de Monte Marisco FitzRobert (c.1197-1242), first Baron FitzRobert and the buildings were incorporated into the present complex by the Mullins family in the late eighteenth century. There's yet another amazing waterwheel.



And a gorgeous view from the bridge

This week has been somewhat unusual because Number One Son, J, is home from Rome for the week. It seems almost strange to have him in his room again as he's been away for huge chunks of the last eight or nine years and usually when he does come home he's dashing up and down seeing people. This week, however he's in residence and it's been lovely to have him just hanging around. He's busy doing all sorts of administrative bits and pieces prior to starting a five year PhD at Princeton in September, so there's been all the choosing of accommodation options and the sorting out of childhood vaccination records for the medical forms. It's like sending him off to university all over again - for the fourth time, as there have already been departures for Cambridge, Cooper Union (Manhattan) and the British School (Rome).

BB and I took him and my mum to Castle Howard for the day, yesterday. We made sandwiches and ate them in the car sheltering from the not-as-warm-as-it-might-have-been breeze, but considering it's still April the weather wan't too bad. White cloudy skies, light breeze and if the promised sunny spells didn't present themselves at least it didn't rain until we were almost home. How very English.


Number One Son wanted to ogle the house because it was designed by Vanbrugh three hundred or so years ago and Vanbrugh was James Sterling's favourite architect and N1S is making a film about Sterling's architecture. We just wanted to ogle the rooms and the pretties and have a mooch around the grounds, taking photographs. Not incompatible objectives.

So we ogled house, pretties and grounds, walking back through Roy Wood with numerous varieties of flowering cherries and delightful clumps of primroses, then had conversations with a noisy peacock, ate a clotted cream tea and came home through only a modest traffic jam. Very pleasant.

Musings on snow

( More pics and waffle behind cut )

And at the top of the lane even though it was still dropping in half-crowns it looked like this at about 1.10 p.m.

The last of it departed with this morning's thaw, but this was yesterday's sunset.

At last - a new-hair-new-glasses pic I don't mind too much

I couldn't resist it. My mum gave me a cheque for Christmas and there was this gorgeous little Samsung 12 megapixel camera on sale in Dixons for half price - which came to one penny less than the amount of mum's cheque. I folded. (My previous digital camera was a whole 2 megapixels.)

I'm now trying to learn how to use it. This is yesterday's view from the bedroom window to Rusby Wood, deeply frosted.



( More pics behind cut )

Not like me at all, but this morning I was up at 7.15 and by 8.00 I was walking up the lane with my camera. heleninwales is a bad influence on me, obviously.

There was such a heavy frost that all the trees were sugar-sprinkled and sparkling in the early light.

Our road dwindles into a farm track. Once upon a time, before Blind Jack of Knaresborough built our turnpike road, this was the main road from Denby to Holmfirth and on mornings like this you can still see ghosts of farm carts and the occasional mail coach.



I've been amazed by tales of mevennen's daffodils. This is why we don't have daffodils yet. the poor little things are struggling against hard frosts. They've barely stuck their heads above the ground.

Talk about not knowing what you've got.

Ally – a regular poster to uk.music.folk – posted a link to an old photograph of an Edinburgh character called John Codona, a one-man-band street entertainer in the 1950s and 60s. It immediately rang a faint bell at the back of my brain.

I'm the current custodian of photographs originally belonging to Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, the Yorkshire Dales dialect poet (1887 - 1967). They were given to me by her niece, Ludi Horenstein who has since died and there is no other family.

I've notified Leeds University that I have them but they seem supremely disinterested in doing anything with the other half of the collection which ended up with them after Ludi's death, so I figure it's better for me to make sure that they end up somewhere sensible. (flickr for starters, probably) and to keep them available for anyone who wants to come and take a look at them (which a couple of people have done already having found me via the relevant page on my artisan website http://www.artisan-harmony.com).

Anyhow, to cut a very long story short, because of the biographical research I've done on Dorothy, I was originally much more interested in the earlier family photos, but DUR's third husband was a professional photographer Alfred Vowles (later changed by deed poll to Alfred Vowles Phillips - another long and irrelevant story.) But part of my photo collection includes an album of black and white photos taken in Scotland, Ireland, the South West and Yorkshire. The ones from the 1950s are mostly Alfred's.

And sitting there in the middle of the 1950s album are some Edinburgh street photographs. Sure enough John Codona is in there but mis-labelled John Cadogan. It's definitely the same bloke as in Ally's 1960s picture, though. There are two photographs of him which I've put them on my new flickr site. Both are taken in Ann Street, Edinburgh 1955 where Dorothy and Alfred lived.

Looking through the photograph album I've got a chunk of social history in my hands - a fair bit of it is Scottish. There's everything here from photos of ancient stones to tinker camps, from groups of children (the Stout family) on the Fair Isles to fishing boats on the Fife coast. I've made a start on posting some of them. Take a look at my pics in the Dororthy Una Ratcliffe Gallery

I will gradually get around to posting more.