Author: Fergy.

Hello there. I am a child of the 50's, now retired and had been enjoying travelling pre-virus. Now I am effectively under house arrest. Apart from travelling, I love playing music (guitar, vocals and a bit of percussion) as the profile pic suggests and watching sport, my playing days are long over. I read voraciously, both fiction and nonfiction I'll read just about anything although I do have a particular interest in military history of all periods. I live alone in fairly central London where I have been for over 30 years since leaving Northern Ireland which was the place of my birth. I adore cooking and I can and do read recipe books and watch food programmes on TV / online all day given half a chance.

Tremendous Tynemouth.

Hello again and welcome back, this writing thing is getting a bit addictive but I know how my moods can swing and I may go off it as quickly as I re-discovered it so I am, as they say, “making hay while the sun shines”. I do hope the sun continues to shine as it has been doing for the last few days as I am back off to my beloved Broadstairs in the next couple of days. OK, I know Folk Week doesn’t start until early August but I have no objection to making an early start and I have a few things to do down there anyway. Happy days.

I cannot believe nearly a year has passed since the last Folk Week although they do say that time goes quicker as you get older and that has certainly been my experience. Let’s see now if I can advance us a day (or maybe two) closer to the present by describing the first full day of the 2022 Euromeet.

I finally make it to Newcastle.

Hello, hello and welcome back again to my apparently endless bout of writing posts which is surprising even me. After such a period of complete apathy and inactivity on the writing front, I must admit that this new burst of enthusiasm has rather taken me by surprise but I’m not complaining, I always did enjoy this before and am doing so once again.

I have no doubt in my mind as to what has prompted this fit of creativity (if indeed you find my rambling discourses here in any way creative) and that is a trip which began on the 19^th of May, 2022, scheduled for four days and which turned into about five weeks over a large swathe of Northern England and was hugely enjoyable, very rewarding and ultimately quite creatively stimulating as my latest flurry of entries here hopefully indicates so please allow me to tell you about it.

Disaster strikes.

Well, well, would you believe it? I wrote honestly in my last entry here that I had awoken before 0400 with a will to write after so long an abstinence from it and I did. A piece which would probably have taken an average University undergraduate about two hours to compose has taken me over 14 hours. I have checked everything, linked, resized images etc. etc. and I do not regret a moment of it. I would rather have my posts done right than done badly. Sorry, that is just my mindset and that constitutes my apology which is par for the course on this site.

Festive cheer in my favourite place.

Hello again folks and welcome back to my slightly disordered ramblings (hence the name of the site) and regular readers are probably wondering exactly what is going on. I disappear for about eight months and then return to be knocking out a post here every day or two. Apart from a hospital appointment yesterday (no, I could not believe an appointment for a scan on a Saturday morning either but the hospital was half-deserted and I was in and out in no time) I have done nothing but write and do all the associated nonsense like compressing images, researching, linking etc. for about a week now and am really enjoying it again, perhaps I just needed a break.

Back to Broadstairs and a different Festival.

Hello again folks and welcome back to my humble scribblings here. As is so often the case, if I am not starting with an apology for something or another, which is not the case here, I am starting with a thanks so thank you for all the kind comments on the last effort. Hopefully this post will be more about travelling than my admittedly poor attempts at philosophy, both travel and otherwise, and even have a few images for you to look at rather than slogging through my thoughts on the world. I really should leave that sort of thing to the ancients, they do it so much better.

My thoughts on this, that and the other.

Hello again folks, thanks so much if you waded your way through the last offering as I know it was a bit of a saga but such is the way I write. My late Mother “gifted” me a Viking middle name to add to my Scottish surname and Irish forename. All these peoples are inherent storytellers and some of it must have filtered down through my genetic inheritance, at least I would like to think so even if I would not count myself amongst the bards or skalds of old. Others say that I just talk too much, which I think is far closer to the truth! I could use a very indelicate expression here but I shall refrain.

Folk Week ends, hospital begins (again!).

Well, well, looks like my generally disorganised life has degenerated into complete madness again.

To try and make some sense of it I should explain that I started this piece some weeks ago in the lovely town of Morecambe on the Lancashire coast but so much has happened since then and I have not got round to updating the blog. There will be tales of all sorts of things, including a hospitalisation (yes, another one!), two canal boat / music festivals (one of which I was booked to play at), a five day canal trip and much else but I decided to leave the below entry as originally written on the principle, as always, that if I start jumping back to the present things will just become too disjointed and confusing. The portion of text in inverted commas is what was written all those weeks ago and then I shall carry on from there.

The week flies by – BFW2021 #7

Hello again folks and thanks for all the comments on my last entry, it seems you have not all forgotten me during my self-imposed hiatus. It is great to catch up with old friends again.

First things first, I am still in Morecambe, Lancashire which is proving to be an incredibly friendly and sociable place even if it has been howling a gale since I arrived. I nearly got blown over walking along the promenade today. I was up and about quite early today after a relatively early night by my standards and went walking. I was surprised at the number of people in running gear that were on the promenade and thought that the good folk of the area must be very health conscious.

The day of reckoning – BFW2021 #6.

Hello folks, welcome back and I shall start with a huge thank you to all the lovely people who sent me such touching messages, you really cannot believe what it means to me.

Without too much of a spoiler for a post I shall probably get round to writing in about six months time, I am composing this is the absolutely beautiful Station Promenade bar in Morecambe, Lancashire of which I have enclosed images above. It is very slightly marred by the modern KFC outlet they have stuck on the end of it but it is not a bad looking little office, is it?

Dave drops a bombshell – BFW 2021 #5

Well, hello again and welcome back to my newly regenerated world, such as it is.

I should start this entry by saying a huge thank you to all the people who visited my pages, logged back in and commented upon them during my absence, it really meant a lot when I logged back in and found all the notifications. It rather makes it worthwhile putting all the time into writing and I do appreciate it.

I am still dithering somewhat as to which way I should take the blog after such a long absence. Should I return to where I was and carry on or should I just skip to my latest trip? Either option has advantages and disadvantages and dithering is something I am complete Master of. As the old saying goes, “I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure”.

I think, on balance and having stared at this page for long enough, that I shall return to where I was as there are some unusual tales between then and now, some of which will help explain my current state of health.

I left you in Broadstairs on the Friday before Folk Week started properly on the Saturday. OK, I know there are official gigs on the Friday now but it does not really start properly until the Saturday.