Social singing

I came across the A Folk Song a Day project today (www.afolksongaday.com). It's the work of Jon Boden, frontman of folk big band, Bellowhead: every day for one year Jon is posting a traditional song online to revive the art of ‘social’ (or communal) singing, now largely confined to football grounds and churches. And Christmas-time, when few can resist a Ding Dong Merrily....

Jon has started an informal monthly singaround in his local pub which is going well, though it hasn't always been plain sailing. As he says in his interview in The Guardian today, "You have to get people used to the idea. It's not the fault of the song, it's the fault of lack of song. People get paranoid about singing in public and I think it stems from parents telling their children they can't sing. It happens a lot. You wouldn't tell someone they have an awful talking voice or they have bad breath, but there seems to be no problem in telling someone they can't sing." (www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jul/28/jon-boden-a-folk-song-a-day)

I'm mindful of this experience as I gather up members for the Braunston Community Choir, which starts rehearsing on Tuesday 10 August (7.30pm, Braunston Village Hall) and whose first public performance will be to open the festival on Saturday 28th August. I'd say roughly 3 out of every 5 people I've talked to about the choir have initially been reluctant to take part because, they say, they can't sing. I've talked some people round, and I hope others will join in as time goes on. I think Gareth Malone's work on The Choir for the BBC has helped encourage more people to consider themselves singers, or at least, not to rule themselves out of the opportunity to sing.

We're delighted to have the support of some recent graduates of the Birmingham Conservatoire and also of Alexander Walker, conductor of Daventry Choral. More soon about the songs we're singing. In the meantime, to all those singers and 'can't singers' in Braunston and nearby, rehearsals are Tuesdays at 7.30pm and Saturdays at 4pm through August, all in Braunston Village Hall.

Spaces and Places

Braunston Playing Field Association hosted a very successful Big Braunston Picnic event on Sunday. This was a day with many hats on - part of the Cultural Olympiad Open Weekend; a consultation on plans to redevelop the play-area; a warm-up for the festival. But chiefly it was an invitation to share a restful Sunday afternoon in the open-air, en masse. I'd say about 40 people brought a picnic and the papers and whiled the afternoon away.

If, as I did, you move from London to a village, you tend to assume that by some rural economy of scale, everyone knows everyone and does everything together, all the time. Maybe that's more about my abiding 'outsider' paranoia. And it's not actually a state of affairs I - or I expect many others - would particularly hanker after: there's a place for anonymity and privacy, or at least an air of mystery...

Nevertheless, opportunities for coming together as a member of a village are fewer than I had expected, despite Braunston having some great open spaces - the vast expanse of the Playing Field. the slopes of Jetty Field. And the curiously shaped Village Green (the least Village Green like Village Green?).

The other day I bumped into a member of the Jetty Field committee, on his knees in the long grass, measuring the distance between the trees in the field. The committee is hoping to plant more trees to restore the avenue which once led from Eastfields House. The Playing Fields committee is to begin fundraising soon to develop the play-area, and improve access.

The festival will try to build on these existing efforts to open up Braunston's spaces and places to more residents and visitors. It'll take more than a bit of bunting, we know (by the way, we're holding a bunting-making workshop on Monday 9th 10-12 in the Village Hall...) and there's a lot of work to be done in terms of getting the word out locally between now and August 28th. If you can help promote the festival in any way, let me know!

Going local

I've just about recovered from my sister's wedding on Saturday. She was married in the beautiful village of Ashby St Ledgers, just up the road from Braunston. Neither she nor her husband have roots in this area, so none of the wedding guests were local. All seemed amazed by the beauty of the village and the area. Why the amazement? Well, I guess the proximity to multiple motorways on the wedding invitation didn't promise much. But also it seems to me that visitors generally don't seem to expect much of Northamptonshire. And then they're always pleasantly surprised by what it's got to offer.

That was one of our motivations for the Braunston festival - to make a song and dance about our local area, and the people connected to it. We've got Tim Butcher, who grew up near Braunston and remembers his mother getting her hair done in the salon opposite the bakery, where he was sent to buy doughnuts. Tim's first book, Blood River, was chosen for the Richard and Judy bookclub in 2008, and his new one, Chasing the Devil, is out in September. He's now based in Cape Town so we are delighted that he's returning to his roots to talk to us about his writing on Saturday 28 August, 7.30pm (tickets available from Braunston Village Shop). We're equally delighted to be featuring Northampton-based ilustrator Elissa Elwick, whose first book for children will come out next year (her event is a free family event in the Big Top in Jetty Field also on Saturday). Also from Northampton we have craftmakers from the Stitch and Make Studio (Sunday), and singing students from the Birmingham Conservatoire (Saturday). The singers will be serenading festival-goers from a canal boat and also helping with the Braunston Community Choir, alongside Alexander Walker, conductor of Daventry Choral Society. We're also featuring a number of local poets. On Saturday 28th August the Village Green will be stuffed full of local food producers - New Horizon fruit, juice and honey, Welland Valley Wines, Hoggley's Beer, Gallone's ice-cream to name but a few. And we've food stalls from two Braunston residents - Daxa's Deli and Wendi's Breads.

One of my jobs in the week before the festival is to collect the generator for our bicycle-powered smoothies. Doesn't sound that exciting, does it? However, our suppliers, Magnificent Revolution, are also supplying generators to Shambala - the Northamptonshire festival for the uber-cool - and that's where the generator renedezvous is to be. I can hardly wait!

Connections

Someone called Jenny from Rugby just called. Her dad is ‘a big vinyl fan’ and he bought a Chris Wood record. Jenny and her husband listened and liked it, and bought their own copy. Jenny knew nothing about Chris Wood so googled him and found his website. She saw Braunston Festival on his tour calendar, googled that and gave me a ring to find out how much the event was (it’s free!), where she could park (the Playing Field), whether she could bring her dog (yes). She was so full of enthusiasm! And her call got me thinking about the individual connections people have with this festival.

At Pre-school in the Village Hall today, I talked to a parent with a relation in a senior role at a major homestore about the possibility of acquiring some end of season stock for our Secret Reading Garden in the Pocket Park on Saturday 28 August. Later on I took my kids to a storytime session in the Village Hall and afterwards talked to staff about the children’s trails and treasure hunts they’ll be running at the festival. This afternoon we walked to the village shop to post a letter to Paramount British Pictures (still on the hunt for Running Scared, the film made in Braunston in 1971 starring Robert Powell) and met Wendi Buchanan who offered to run some ‘It’s a knockout’ style activities at the Fun on the Field event on Sunday 29 August, and to make refreshments for the cinema night on 7 August (she’s already running a bread stall at the festival itself). In the shop I got talking to Shane, who works for a local events company and offered us the use of a Rodeo Bull. The shop kindly agreed to put our highly technical film voting system (jam jars and pennies) for Braunston Cinema on the counter. And then on the way back home I stopped at The Wheatsheaf to talk to Glen, the landlord, about running the beer tents for the festival and putting on a band in the evening of Monday 30 August. I might still be there were it not for my family responsibilities of cooking some sort of dinner.

This festival lark gives me many sleepless nights, grey hairs, and not a few dark nights of the soul. But it has also given me the chance to meet so many good people, and to uncover the hundreds of connections lying just below the surface of village life. It’s been a good day!