23rd June 2007: Barton Le Clay

We had our very good friends over from Reading this weekend. The two wives and two daughters took themselves off to Hyde Park to see Crowded House whilst the two husbands and sons joined Rob and went to Barton Le Clay - which is where the real action was!

Ross was raising money for a new village hall in Barton and had asked a lot of his friends along to do a session.

Joe and Alex, our friends from Reading agreed to come along - Joe is rapidly becoming our official photographer and he was taking arty shots throughout the 30 minute slot. The two boys seemed rather bemused by the whole proceedings but, with both of them being budding guitarists were very content to watch closely. We gave The Bite another run out.

It was good to see a lot of familiar faces supporting Ross. John Breeze did his usual excellent sessions - but then it was time for us to get the boys home. As we have remarked in previous blog entries, we don't have a great deal of luck on the motorways after gigs. This was the grandaddy of them all. We left Barton around 8.45pm and were veritably flying along the M1 until we ran into road works which, later turned into them closing the M1. So we had 'to make our own entertainment' for two hours as, with everyone else, we crept towards the remaining exit. We talked about every subject under the sun - in particular the Spanish Civil War, we told jokes and, thankfully(?), the two boys had plenty of playground jokes to contribute. But the biggest laugh was watching Rob turn puce as he began to regret the couple of pints of Guinness he'd had just before leaving. Eventually we made it through the jam and, with a pained expression, Rob dutifully ended up watering a St Albans rugby pitch - I don't think either of us will be doing any more diving over the try line in that vicinity. We got home to find wives and daughters already back from London after being mightily p***ed on by the rain - but, certainly for my wife at least, any hardship is worth it for Crowded House.