singing in brittany

We are getting more excited at the thought of the upcoming concert we are giving with some Breton and French friends in June. Edwige & Pierre-Jean are going to let us have MP3 tracks of some of their songs that have choruses so we wont look complete dorks trying to mouth words we dont know (or even understand, in my case). The Breton songs I am not even going to think about attempting.

There was another singing session in the bar at St Carreuc last saturday. There are some really smashing singers around, and we are starting to get to know some of the people and their songs. There is a sort of "here's a song about XYZ", or whatever and then they ask, "is there an english song about that?" If we sing a song about love/courtship in any or all of its guises they most certainly have a song about THAT! This is France after all. It can be very frustrating to see everyone smiling/laughing/guffawing at a song that goes completely over my head, but I can usually work out what it is sort-of-about, I just tend to miss the punchlines.

May is the month of bank holidays over here. There are 4. I wonder if that nice (??) Mr Sarkozy will do something about them? NOTHING gets done in May. People are either getting over one day off or getting ready for the next. Invariably 'on fait le pont' (make the bridge) between bank holiday and any ajacent weekend. That plus "la Presidentielle" (election) means that booksales have been decidedly quiet recently. The French can apparently concentrate on only one thing at a time.... Never mind - we have had time to get a couple of thousand more books on line, mow the grass, tongue-and-groove another section of roof upstairs in the barn and cycle into Rostrenen and back (nearly put my lights out, that one, cycling uphill into the wind coming home!) The GOOD thing is that there are "feu d'artifice" (fireworks) tomorrow night in Rostrenen (its another bank holiday), so rain-permitting we will go and see them after our breton dance class. If I remember, I will take the camera and post some pictures.

Does anyone know about setting up podcasts? Some of the song sessions we go to would be great to podcast.

Watch this space!