Convivial!

I attended Gideon Strauss’ blogger convivium last night, playing the role of “the ambassador from Accordion City“. It was finally a chance to meet Gideon, whom I knew only through his blog and some communication via email and blog comments. I rather like meeting people whose work I read and enjoy, and sometimes some very interesting things happen.

I had a nice hot mug of Gluhwein, a bowl of excellent potato-leek soup, and some excellent conversation with the crowd that ran the gamut of urban planning (“Have you ever notcied that suburban architecture seems to make the storage of cars its number one priority?”) to people switching from one demonination of Christianity to another (“They’d signed a temporary mutual non-burning pact, and the part of the phrase that got me was the word temporary“) to the very sweet concern for my well-being of Summer and Shimmer, the Strausslings (“If you’re out all night, do you sleep during the day? When do you go to church?”).

I didn’t get a chance to give my answers to Summer and Shimmer, so here they are: “Well, I ususally don’t sleep in later than noon on Sundays, and I’m often up earlier”, and “Not as often as is proscribed, but more often than my rather secular friends think. There’s a nice mass at St. Mike’s at 5:00 p.m., which is well past the span of most hangovers, and a charming cantor-and-guitar mass at 9:00 for procrastinators and accordion-playing pop-culture aficionados who happen to be shopping at the nearby HMV around that time.”

There was some singing too. I pulled out the accordion, Angela alternated between piano and violin, and others made use of the Strauss’ collection of interesting percussion instruments. We started with some Christmas carols and later, a few hymns. Carols tend to be universal, but I recognized the melodies of only half the hymns, coming from a rather different branch of Jesus Fan Club. I recognized the words — a good number of hymns crib their lyrics from the Psalms — but the melodies were unknown to me. It’s like being a speaker of North American English being telported to downtown Sheffield, where “apples and pears” means “stairs”, a “lorry” is a truck and “lunch” means “an owl, deep-fried in its own feathers, smeared in mayonnaise”. They asked me to play some of my busking numbers, and did Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild, All My Love in response to a request for Zep, Fatboy Slim’s Praise You, Cecilia when Bethany found Angela’s Simon and Garfunkel songbook, and my rendition of Jim Breuer’s impression of The Hokey Pokey if AC/DC covered it.

I had a wonderful time meeting the Strauss family and guests at the convivum. I’ll cut-and-paste some thank-yous from Gideon’s blog:

Thank you to Will, Sarah, Darren, Chris, Kathy, Ray, Jake, James, Brian, Nicole, Rich, Rob, Joey, Daniel, Bethany, Summer, Shimmer, and Angela, for a most convivial convivium!

And thank you, Gideon!