Glastonbury Astonbury. The Friday night review.

2 names for 2 festivals.  The same apart from 2 letters, and the fact they both had music but the similarity ends there.  One is famed for mud, camping, outside stages, stone circles and various hippy type stuff.  The other took place in a church or a village hall and served tea.  Ordinary tea which you get from a supermarket, not tea made with herbs or mushrooms or whatever.  Well I don't know about the Saturday, but the Friday concert which took place in the church was definately not like Glastonbury.  Not that it mattered.  It had it's own character and charm.

Apparently this has been one of the most well attended Astonburys ever. The church was almost full to capacity.  This could be due to there being a lot of childrens acts performing.  The panto kids and teenagers sang some songs from the panto.  Aston school choir sang too.  Kathy Razzell did a showcase of her music students, my personal favourite being the one who did the Monty Python theme tune. Dan Jefferies played his guitar and sang some songs.  He is a confident, natural performer who was completely comfortable in front of the crowd. If he keeps going the way he is I can see him joining the next big boy band when he's a bit older.

Of the adults to name a few, we had Joe Nutman on his keyboard, Alison Hurt and Luke Fitchett (They did both nights), and Tony Luke, our vicar.  He has a really great singing voice.  He got as far as boot camp once on the x-factor you know.  Oh and some hand bell ringers.  They were surprisingly good.

Most of the acts were people from the village or nearby and did short slots. They were all quality acts and it showed that Aston definately does have talent.

The church was toasty warm, much warmer than on a Sunday I hate to say.  (Not that I want to put anyone off going to church on a Sunday.  In winter wear a good coat and sit somewhere in the middle and its usually not too bad.  In the summer it's pleasantly cool ).  They put the side heaters on as well as the middle ones.

Build up to the well dressing

The well dressing is probably the biggest event on Aston's calendar and it starts tomorrow.  People come from all over Derbyshire to see it.  It seems a bit bizarre that Aston would have a well dressing when it doesn't even have a well and more bizarre that it isn't something that has been happening for years and years which started when there was a well, but was revived in the late 1990s (I think).  Anyway not that I'm complaining, as it's a great event and fun for all the family.  There are several stalls and also shows from magicians, pinxton puppets, black pig border morris dancers as well as well dressings made by several local organisations.  There are many local organisations and in fact it's a standing joke in the village that if you see 2 people talking in the street, they're probably talking about forming a committee.

The bunting went up a couple of weeks ago and the all the groups in the area have been working on them this week.  They have to be made completely from natural materials, so there's no leisurely making them over a long period of time, they're worked on intensively the week before or else stuff will go off.  Any flower petals used are put in a day or 2 before the event.  It never ceases to amaze me the variety of things people use to make a well dressing, anything from leaves to coconut to curry powder to berries, wool and stones.  The church has also been decorated by various groups doing little displays all around it.  The whole village has been a buzz with preparation and I'm sure many people will be up early in the morning to set things up.

Lets just hope the weather is ok and there's no rain left in the clouds after we had a whole months worth of rain in one day today.

Beacon

Across the country, beacons have been lit in honour of the Queen's diamond jubilee.  Here's the one on Aston church:-

Not the best photo I know, what with it being a bit dark.  Quite a lot of people turned out to see it.  They had some music accompanying it.  Very atmospheric it was too.

Jubilee

I have not been to any of the Aston jubilee events so far, not because there aren't any; there are events running over all four days.  More than we have had visitors or been doing other things.  Nice to see lots of bunting up all around the village.  My daughter made bunting by drawing on paper and threading string through it.  Unfortunately it absolutely chucked it down with rain...

We did go to church on Sunday morning.  The vicar was a real royalist, the Queen was very much in the prayers and at the end we had the national anthem.  In the press I have heard a lot about street parties and how there's loads of them happening all over the country.  I haven't seen any tho.  I want to go to a street party.  Still, there's two days left so you never know.

Writers Block

I've been having a bit of writers block lately and, although there have been things to write about I haven't been motivated or able to think of an interesting slant on it.  But as living things die if you don't feed them, blogs die if you don't write in them, so I'm going to write something and hope it flows.

Today was the May Fayre in the Memorial Hall.  It was run by the church.  They had several stalls, the usual village fair type things, plants, bric a brac, homemade cakes, tombola etc.  I picked up a few bits which I was pleased about and a carrot cake which was very tasty.  They did a ploughmans lunch, which consisted of some salad, but the diet went out of the window when you saw what went with it.  There was a choice of some large wedges of pork pie, huge hunks of cheese or massive slices of pizza, (and from what I could tell you could have more than one of those choices too) followed by a choice of puddings with cream.  No-one could say the folks at the church aren't generous.  The hall was full of people and there was a good atmosphere.  Hopefully they made lots of money.

Good Friday workshop

Every Good Friday Aston church do a workshop for the children.  First they do an Easter egg hunt.  Some of the bigger kids hide eggs around the church for the younger ones to find.  As there were slightly less kids there this year than usual the kids got more than the usual 5 egg limit.  There were some crafts and some colouring and a favourite amongst the kids was the Easter garden which was made by the children going to look for flowers and plants in the church yard and putting them in the big tray of soil in the church.  They had water sprays for the plants which the kids really loved.  During the whole event they gave out tea and hot cross buns and at the end Tony the vicar got his guitar out and we all sang some songs.

Palm Sunday

On Palm Sunday Aston church had a joint service with the Methodist church, where they start off at the Methodist church and walk to Aston C of E church behind one of the children dressed as Jesus would have done and riding a REAL donkey.  I was pretty impressed by this and apparently they do it every year.  This year they had a girl Jesus which was only fair, why should only boys get the fun of a donkey ride?  As we don't have very many real palm trees growing in Aston, they gave us some greenery from an evergreen tree to wave.  We all sang songs on the way to the church and when we got to the lych gate, everyone put their leaves on the ground for the donkey to walk on.  I didn't have a leaf.  In Jesus time people who didn't have leaves put their coats down for the donkey to walk on.  I had my good coat on so I wasn't about to chuck it on the ground for the donkey to walk over, especially as I've seen that donkey before and it doesn't really care where it does a poo.  It came in for a nativity service once and pooed on the church floor.  I guess the chances of it pooing at the precise moment it walked over my coat are quite low and if I was wearing an old coat I may have risked it. I like to think that if it was the real Jesus riding on a donkey and I was actually there at the time, that I would have put my coat down no matter how good I thought my coat was.  Anyway, I digress.  In church Tony did a family friendly interactive talk through what happened through the week coming up to Easter, which was very informative if you didn't know the Easter story.

Mothers Day

It was a family service at church ton Sunday morning, so the vicar Tony made his sermon family friendly.  He asked for a child volunteer out to the front.  There was a shortage of willing children, so he got his daughter to come out.  He demonstrated the reading from the Gospel by giving her clothes to wear (over the ones she was already wearing) with a word on them.  Eg the first one was a t-shirt with the word compassion stuck to it.  A couple of items of clothing later, (which shamefully I can't remember what words they had on them), and out came a pair of boxer shorts with the word humility pinned onto them.  At this point Charlotte refused to wear them, so Tony opened it up to the whole church and asks if anyone, of any age would like to come forward and wear them.  No one volunteers.  So a couple more items then he finishes up saying that they all come under the umbrella of love.  Then he picked up the boxer shorts again and asked again if anyone will wear the boxer shorts of humility.  At this point I started to feel a bit sorry for him, so looked again at the boxer shorts and did a quick mental size calculation and thought I was probably a bit fat for them and I'd be stood at the front trying to squeeze into the things or even worse, they'd split or something, so I figured it wouldn't really be a good idea.  After all they are the boxer shorts or humility, not humiliation.  Very similar word but quite a different meaning.  They gave all the women a nicely wrapped polyanthus, but I was near the back so by the time it got to me there weren't any left so I got a leftover one with less flowers on that they didn't wrap.  It may be a leftover plant with little flowers but I shall love and nurture it anyway.  We said this really lovely prayer thanking God for our mothers and for the many things that our mothers have done for us which we may not even realise, which really struck a chord with me.  As we left Tony asked again if we were all sure we didn't want to wear the boxer shorts of humility.  


I didn't go out for dinner or anything like that as my mum lives miles away and the kids were away too.  Someone sympathised.  Someone else said having break from the kids was a great mothers day present. I bet all the pubs or restaurants were busy and crowded anyway, so I don't feel like I was missing much.