Domi, the fiddle player in the folk band I was playing with, has some health issues and decided a while ago that he can no longer play fast enough for Irish music, so my role in the band was redundant. To be honest, as they play mostly for dances, I was a bit of a spare part anyway. However, Domi has a friend, Patrice, who was interested in meeting up with us, to see if we could put something together. We arranged a get-together a couple of months ago, but Domi was ill, so we cancelled; we tried again a few weeks later, but Fabienne was unwell, so again it was cancelled, so Domi gave Patrice my number and he came over one afternoon. 

I thought he wanted only to play Irish music, but he seemed more interested in the other songs in my repertoire, a hotch-potch of folk, jazz and 60’s songs. Whether or not anything will come of it remains to be seen.

We chatted for a while, then Patrice said that he was meeting an old friend, an Irish musician, who lives in Spain but was holidaying in Salies de Béarn, a spa town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the following week and would I like to join them? My evenings being generally very quiet, I agreed and only realised just before he left, that we were going busking!

This had never been an item on my bucket list, so  would be a novel experience; I packed my guitar and headed to Salies to meet up with Patrice, Oisin and his Basque wife, whose name sounded a bit like “Eintsanie”, though I’m sure that’s not how it’s spelt, maybe Einxsani?

We started in a bar, Patrice on fiddle, Oisin on fiddle or penny whistle and me on guitar, but the bar staff found the penny whistle too piercing, so we moved to a table on the pavement and continued to play. At first I struggled to work out the chords to music I hadn’t heard before, something I could do easily 50 years ago, but it came back to me as the evening progressed. It turned out that Einxsani can play guitar too, so occasionally she would borrow my guitar for numbers she knew but I didn’t. The other people around were very pleased to listen to us and said they’d miss us when we finished.

After a couple of hours, we moved on to somewhere we could get something to eat, not easy at 9 o’clock in the evening in France, even in a touristy town! The conversation during the meal was interesting; Patrice speaks only French, Einxani Spanish and Basque and Oisin English, Spanish and a little French. My Spanish isn’t good, but Einxani and I managed to understand each other, at a simple level.

It was a lovely evening; a shame that Oisin and Einxsani live so far away, they were such good company.

I hope the link to you tube works, though the video’s quite long; I don’t expect anyone to listen to the whole thing!