The Guitar Weekend

The guitar weekend happens at Friar's Carse just outside Dumfries, a beautiful and tranquil old building with pictures of Rabbie Burns on every wall, sometimes looking rather effete. It looks over a quiet part of the river Nith and has lots of different trees, thick mossy lawns and thousands of rabbits that all ran away when I tried to take their photo. The trees are full of bullfinches and other birds, and an osprey wheeled overhead one afternoon. There were chattering swallows nesting in the eaves of the entrance.
It's the third time I've been and it's huge fun and hard work in equal measures; you get to try out different chords and to understand the way different sorts of guitar music work (and if you are me, forget the whole lot when you get home), and then in the evenings there are informal concerts.
This year there were three banjo players, who each played totally differently and that was a real treat, to hear them all together. Martin, Gary and Brian did a set to start off with, playing I Pray at Richard's request, then we all got up and did turns, starting with Ragtime Steve, who keeps bees in Tain and has more honey than he knows what to do with. Tim joined me for Freight Train and the other Tim (three Tims and three Alans!) and Martin for Heaven Avenue.
The last person turned in at four a.m.
I loved it- the guys are really good company (there must have been about 20 chaps and only one me this year) and it was well worth the more-than-three-hundred-mile-drive to get there. The sun shone and so did the music!
Well done to Andrew Bailey for organising it!

Below:
Parked guitar cases, at rest. Sometimes, flocks of cases swept across the floor; at others, they nestled in huddles under the piano. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and definitely not as many guitars!

Guitarists concentrating and listening to each other.

Martin demonstrates the impossible photo-opportunity chord as practised by showoffs the world over!

Backs: on the first night we all took a turn flanked by Gary and Brian to see what it feels like to play guitar with experts.