Party night!

Saturday night was party night in Chertsey's inimitable style. The gramophone was hauled onto the deck and out came the latest platters.

Da Boyz

On an impulse, I texted Captain Pete to let him know that a new consignment of 78s had arrrived and he strolled down with an old friend who was visiting for the weekend. You must think we're mad, Jim said to the friend. No, he said, nodding at Pete. I'm used to it. They mentioned that they were hungry and I realised that I had committed the immense social solecism of inviting people to a party without food. Undaunted, I raided the stores beneath the water tank and rustled up a variety of sandwiches - cheese and tomato, cheese and pickle, and cheese. Also, we had rather a lot of walnuts, which made excellent nibbles. One thing we weren't short of was beer, and presently Enceladus Sarah arrived bearing some contrastingly posh snacks, many of which gave us the opportunity to argue about the pronunciation of chorizo (it's Spanish, not Italian!). The party was well under way, and many other guests dropped by in passing, Strangely, none of them stayed very long...

We had a brief live music interlude and melodeon workshop, in which I attempted to remember how to play Hard Working Boater on a borrowed melodeon which turned out to lack a vital note (a B, if you were wondering) and didn't manage very well (I reassured myself by getting it right first time when I got home, on my familiar instrument). Then the disco really got going, and the dog blanket volume control was removed from the front of the gramophone (as all our neighbours had removed themselves...)

During the workshop Jim and Andy disappeared into the hold to work on the database Andy has set up of all the records in the Shellac Massive's repertoire. It then transpired that Pete also had a collection of 78s (some 400) and a database too. You couldn't make it up could you. So they compared databases and discussed the intricacies of serial numbers and dating. In this fashion we partied on until well after ten.