Here’s something I wrote way back February 2016, which still applies today:

I often recall these last two lines from the first poem in Ted Hughes’s “Birthday Letters”, “Fulbright Scholars”:

At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things

I am way past 25 but dumbfounded almost daily by my ignorance of simple things, and the things that other people know …

Here’s something I have only learnt about this month: Sessions. Singers and musicians gather round a table with their instruments and take it in turns to play, sing, or both. They are not part of a group or a choir, just a  collection of vaguely connected, or unconnected, people. Did you know about these things? Until this month I had never seen one. A handful of times I have seen people sat around a table in an Irish bar playing traditional tunes, but assumed that they were all part of the same band.

I had been meaning, since the summer, to check out a “Music Night” that I had heard about, which runs every Tuesday at a pub in Brentford. It took me until the start of December to get there.

I was expecting the usual scene: a small stage, or a corner of the room, with at the very least a microphone on a stand and a rudimentary PA system to plug into. But no, it was a gathering of people mostly my age and older, with their acoustic instruments, no amplification, taking it in turns to sing old favourites or try things out for the first time. That first evening I went for old favourites, mostly #1s: “Que Sera Sera” (1956), “Green Door” (1981) and “All I have to do is dream” (1958). Just after I had put my coat on and was heading out the door someone requested something from 2023. So I did a quick run-through of the year’s biggest #1, “Flowers” (Miley Cyrus), still wearing my winter coat. There was a very accomplished violinist playing along with most of the tunes, in among all the acoustic guitars, a mandolin or two and a couple of melodicas (I hadn’t seen one of those since I was a teenager). His solo on “All I have to do is dream” was a real treat. I also ran through “The Rare Old Mountain Dew” earlier in the evening, my tribute to the late Shane McGowan. I sang along with a group rendition of “Fairytale of New York”, but I have never learnt how to play it.

At the next Session I tried out a song I had never played before in public: “Leaving on a Jet Plane”. Peter, Paul and Mary’s version was a US #1 in 1969 but only got to #2 in the UK. It’s the perfect way to try out things that I have only ever played in private before. I wish I had tried out these Music Sessions months ago. I am “dumbfounded afresh / By my ignorance of the simplest things”.