Music and beer, north and south.

 I love live music, well at least most of it, and I also love beer, particularly real ale. And sometimes I get both together. Take a recent Wednesday evening at one of Oxford locals: the Bookbinders Arms. The session is run my Lee Bo, himself a very talented musician and singer and there is always a selection of ales at the pub. The place was pretty well packed by eaters, drinkers and musicians but we managed to squeeze ourselves into a space pretty near to the action.

Regular performers Julie and Mark gave a great performance of two of their own unique combinations of strings, percussion and voice. They had a hard act to follow. Two chirpy young girls of about eight years old gave a giggly but rather nice performance of a couple of songs accompanied by recorded background music. They were great and loudly applauded.  Next, an extraordinary young man called Luke gave his guitar a thorough beating whilst pumping out choice vocals. It was a most unusual performance and musically very exciting. He uses his guitar as a drum whilst striking the strings and sliding the notes. I found it quite thrilling. A group of three young men then gave a great upbeat jazzy number on keyboard, trumpet and guitar. That done the the smiling keyboard player vamped out a number based on an odd but infectious song concerning poisoning pigeons in the park! This was followed by a big man doing a solo on guitar whilst singing, very, very powerfully. He sang two songs that were completely new to me. Riveting. And the beer was good too.

Later that week we travelled up to Wick to visit Margaret’s ailing aunt (they are the same age) and broke the journey at Inverness. We had been there before, predominantly then to take our sons to Loch Ness. This time we arrived so late that the hotel called to say that we would have to let ourselves in – so we took a circuitous route searching for food, beer and music along the way, and we found it all. The place really throbs and is also rather beautiful especially near the River Ness. And yes, there was live music. Quite a few pubs in Church Street advertise it and the one we ended up at, the Highlander, featured a man playing the piano accordion and singing very enthusiastically whilst accompanied by an electric guitar. It was powerful stuff with a good admixture of Scottish folk. The beer however was awfully cold and fizzy. Quite a few of the Inverness pubs had decorative handpumps, but, disappointingly, very few of these actually dispensed real ale.

However, we liked Inverness so much that we spent another night there on our way back. This time we started in the Hootananny where a constantly expanding group of musicians played folk music on a selection of instruments. It seemed very Irish to me, but there are of course strong connections between the Highlands and that island. There we ate Balmoral Chicken, which is chicken breast stuffed with haggis, wrapped in bacon and served with a whisky or peppercorn sauce together with mashed spuds. Great, my sort of food. Again we finished off at the Highlander where there was frantic dancing which included crawling between women’s legs. I was not allowed to do that.