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The Saturday night was lovely too. Fantastic meal, lovely French wines, and then after a half-hour concert from Tom it was open-mic time of sorts in the drawing-room, where everyone just let rip one after another jamming on favourite songs. Hours of it. It only stopped when we reached the regulation quiet time on site at 11.30. Mentioned to Tom that it was a full-moon night. He seemed very taken with that, and suggested that those still awake go for a midnight moonlit walk around the garden. I wandered a little further away, into the next field, just wanting a little more quiet. In the end I thought I might have gotten locked out of the house for the night when I returned! I was last in for the night by several minutes. But in between, I stood in that field and watched the full moon rising over the curve of the next meadow next to a copse of trees. Stillness, in the middle of the country. Not total stillness; a motorway was audible somewhere over the hill, even in deepest greenest Chiddingstone, but the atmosphere was still just utterly magic. Sharp on my soul hung the imminent line of grass, so to speak. It triggered a memory of being sick home from school when I was 11, hearing The Beatles' "Blackbird" on the radio during the day and having a resulting daydream vision of absolute peace, standing in the middle of a moonlit English country field, "in the dead of night", with one bird calling across the fields. On Saturday night there was no bird, black or otherwise, and the house and motorway were both a bit close, but I'd still say it scored 89% on my 1981 daydream. Gobsmacking. That minute or two in the field fuelled the song that I wrote complete the next day, which was performed for the first time less than eight hours after the first line entered my head. That's unheard of for me. Finishing a song in thirty times that time would normally be extraordinary in my case, never mind getting it performed as well! Overnight, the moonlit view from the bedroom window was pretty magic too, and in the morning, the fog was everywhere, the rising sun an orange disc struggling over the hill and through the wispy mist.
In a break in our Sunday concert, Tom gave me a special one-to-one rendition of "Martin"...I'd been shouting for it during his show the night before! At last, come late Sunday afternoon, it was time to leave. I never wanted to leave that beautiful HOUSE! Everyone had a productive and enjoyable time, and we all said our fond farewells, made promises to contact and collaborate, and headed off to cars or taxis to get on with the task. What a wonderful, creative, soul-soothing weekend.
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