Getting there
My Sore Fingers week in England was enormous fun and started when I got to Heathrow on Friday morning after an extremely jolly flight from Stockholm. One of the BA hosties took a fancy to my Aussie accent or something and insisted on plying me with Bin & Gitter Lemons until "I hardly couldn't shtand up". Have I come to Paradise I wondered? Nope, just London and off to pick up a guitar that I’d arranged to borrow for the week.

Next day (Saturday) I climbed on the Kingham train at London Paddington at about 2 PM and had a few surreptitious plays on the train to while away the time. Discovered that the guitar I’d borrowed was an amazingly awful example of the Resonator Guitar species. Sounded more like a banjo on some of the strings. But I digress… We got as far as Oxford and a young bearded chap and his lovely blonde girlfriend got on the train with their bikes. (Very civilised that: you aren't allowed to take a bike on the train in Sweden, and if you do send it as rail freight (a) it costs a small fortune and (b) it probably doesn't arrive at the same time as you do!) After some desultory chit-chat it turned out that they too were bound for Sore Fingers and were able to give me some tips about getting to Kingham and the school, since they'd "been there yesterday". What I didn't know then of course was that he was Matt Flinner, one of the world's absolute top Bluegrass mandolin players and teacher of this year's mandolin class. Good thing I didn't do my usual trick of telling him all about how to play the mandolin or something!

When you get out at Kingham there's a bus that takes you the 2½ miles from the station to the centre of Kingham which turned out to be a thatchy sort of village on the edge of The Cotswolds, and not at all the large-ish town that I'd imagined. So there I was, suitcase in one hand, dobro in the other, no taxis for 100 miles or so wondering how the Sam Hill I was going to manage the 1½ miles to Kingham Hill Boarding School on that narrow Oxfordshire country road. As luck would have it I was rescued by Anita and Carol, two old-time banjoists who kindly offered to take my stuff in their car, there not being room for me as well. Suitably fortified with Kingham Inn fruitcake and tea I hoofed it down the narrow road to the school and the check-in queue. On first sight it felt like I'd come to an old people's home. Nearly everyone seemed to be as ancient as me, or even older. But no, turns out there were quite a lot of younger ones too. After queuing for ½ an hour and getting the wrong name badge (how was I to know that there was another "H" in the dobro class, whose name is, well, … H!) I was told off for accommodation in Silverstone dormitory, Bradford House. Bradford is one of the somewhat more remote houses in the school complex.

Life (back) at boarding school
I was in a dormitory with 5 others, an experience that brought back stark memories from my own time as a boarder at The Kings School in Sydney. You had to climb a ladder to get to your bunk, and there was a desk and lamp built in underneath. Sort of an Instant Study. Very whippy compared to the long rows of hard iron beds we had at school in Parramatta! It was very hot at night as the heating was turned on full blast and the organisers didn't dare turn it off for fear of not being able to restart it "in case". It happened one year apparently, they managed to get the heat switched off and then couldn't turn it on again when the weather suddenly turned nasty, the result being that everyone did a big freeze for a few days. Having been forewarned I remembered to bring some earplugs (and forgot to take a towel) so the nightly truly amazing range of snores didn't bother me too much. No doubt I contributed with a few of my own! That side of things worked quite well. We had access to a little kitchen and could brew the odd cup of tea/coffee, and a boot room where we had a jam session on the very first night. Then there was the "No Banjo Playing After Ten o'clock Please" rule which everyone seemed to obey. Probably because we were all up in the School Pub anyway, playing away madly until 2 or 3 in the morning. Well, some of us did, though I couldn't manage to stay up any later than about 12:30, tuckered out from trying to keep up with the Old-Time banjo players.