Some esoteric thoughts on 11.11, musical stones and my favourite dish
Chris Hladowski
It all began for me with the chocolate bourbon biscuits in the B & B (which I ate). Then the first walk along Main Street with its numerous delis, pub lunches, sweet shops, and ice cream vans… how to choose your favourite dish?
Nicola Atkinson.Davidson and Hanna Tuulikki assure me that I love
pickles – which I do. But I also love Ukrainian rye bread;
salted butter; tea with sugar and a slice of lemon in it; and fish
and chips…. Not to mention my babcia’s zupa ogórkowa
(sour gherkin soup), which I guess qualifies as a pickle in liquid
form. To make things even more confusing Keswick has one of the
largest and most diverse supermarket-cum-delis I have ever seen,
featuring pickled quails eggs, apple smoked cheese, damson beer,
exotic vegetable crisps I have never heard of before, and of course,
the notorious CUMBERLAND SAUSAGE! Word has it you can even drive
around the place in a tractor surrounded by gnomes, but I think
I missed that bit.
So no hope for clarity on the subject of my favourite dish - unless
you want me to write a book about it. So let’s broaden the
horizon a bit. Eating is much more enjoyable in the open air on
a sunny day, and it was indeed sunny as I ate my cider apple ice
lolly whilst we made our way to Keswick museum and art gallery,
the venue for a musical performance in celebration of Nicola’s
latest work “I am a Dish”.
It is wonderful to gaze out of the old windows of the museum towards
lake Derwent, with its rolling hills climbing up and out of the
lagoon like moss-clad turtles looking for a sunny spot in which
to relax. There are templates hanging from these windowpanes, which
can be used to identify the local peaks according to a number system
that corresponds to a chart on the wall. But I prefer to just look
at the hills… content in my ignorance. There are numerous
artefacts of genuine interest in the museum however, such as two
pairs of Victorian hiking boots, a catalogue of taxidermies (birds,
badgers, ferrets, foxes, even a mummified cat from god knows when),
a penny farthing bicycle, various rocks and minerals, and a man
trap. The centrepiece however, is, of course, the stone xylophone,
variously termed the stone dulcimer, the rock harmonicon, or the
geological piano.
We (Aby Vulliamy, George Murray, Bill Wells, Hanna Tuulikki, and
myself) played 4 pieces at the performance, all of which included
the stone xylophon in some capacity, and all of which had at least
a vague association with foodstuffs. We opened with ‘Souling
Song’, an autumnal folksong and antecedent to Hallowe’en,
All Saints and All Souls, which describes the old tradition of children
knocking on peoples’ doors and asking for ‘soulcakes’
in order the placate the dead, who are able to journey more easily
into the world of the living at this time of year. The piece has
an unusual, quite primitive sounding trichordal harmony that wonderfully
evokes the mystery of autumn.
Bill wrote “Liquorice Tics”, a piece that also features
on his latest album, a collaboration with the Japanese band Maher
Shalal Hash Baz. The title is apparently an intuitive spelling of
liquorice sticks (not, as I had wondered, a new variety of edible
parasites invented by Bassett’s). I hit the wrong rocks in
the actual performance but it didn’t seem to matter. We had
practiced this piece in the dining room of the bed and breakfast
earlier in the day, shortly after the last of the soggy cornflakes
had been cleared away. It felt like Sly and the Family circa “There’s
a Riot Goin’ On”. No one was feeling sheepish on this
one.
The third piece that we played was an improvisation, somewhat in
the style of Meredith Monk, and jam-packed with vocal avant-gardisms.
Essentially we read out-loud, randomly, from the list of foodstuffs
that Nicola had produced in collaboration with Keswick High School,
whilst improvising on the old rock piano. The only ‘rule’
was that if anyone said Cumberland Sausage we must all ‘freak
out’ – which we duly did.
The fourth piece was “John Barleycorn”, another old
folk song in which the protagonist is a personification of the important
cereal crop barley, and of the alcoholic beverages made from it
- beer and whisky (which we all made an effort to sample during
our stay in the town). In the song John Barleycorn is represented
as suffering attacks, death, and indignities that correspond to
seasonal harvest patterns such as reaping and malting. Some believe
that the song points to the survival of a Neolithic rite of paganism
- and local treasures such as the nearby Castlerigg stone circle
only act to excite such romantic wonderings.
The final piece was a twelve bar blues, less food orientated than
the others, but nonetheless mouth-watering, for which we were joined
by museum curator and general Hoochie Coochie man, Jamie Barnes,
on mouth harp. All in all it was a lovely evening, replete with
assorted vegetables and beverages – thanks are due to everyone
who made it such a success.
