Across the pond

The other trigger for my dream last night came from a jest in a thank you letter suggesting we take  the show on tour. The show was the one I put on at Lauderdale House, the former home of Nell Gwyn on Highgate Hill, which is now a favoured location for parties in the Gospel Oak part of London. This party to celebrate my wife’s 70th birthday took me and my daughters two months to organise. Which is one major reason why Daily Novel blogs have been so thin on the ground in 2010.

The emphasis was on singing and dancing rather than speechifying. To get it going required a lot of browbeating of  relatives,  friends and neighbours to stand up and support me in a sing a long to make the guests sing for their supper. It had to include, Leaning on a Lamp, and since I am tone deaf it required the support of James, one of my daughter’s friends on the Brazilian ukelerle, and Michael, the neighbbourhood lumberjack singer.

And, of course, a decent jazz band to provide the sort of music my wife and I, along with many of our neighboursr, have enjoyed for the past ten years at the Humphrey Lyttelton charity concerts organised by the friends of the Royal Free Hosital. The concerts have gone on performed by the jazz men who worked with him. Happily the pianist for our party was Ted Beament who played in most of those concerts and was happy to bash out my very eclectic choice of songs. All of the Tucker Finlayson band, which is a mixture of men who have played with Humph, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, entered into the spirit of the occasion.

So this was one of my manic ideas that actually worked. The dream did not give me quite enough energy to start a new career as an impressario, but it did provide the impetus for a third blog.