Peter and Janes House Concert

Our visit to the fair City of Melbourne and our stay with Peter and Jane Crone is sadly coming to an end. We move on to the Brunswick Music Festival today. It's difficult to say what we will miss most, the music, the friendship, the wonderful food and wine or the daily banter. Peter and Jane have looked after us superbly, in fact, we feel much like part of the family and Melbourne has been a joy to visit. The organisation for the House concert was brilliant. Jane with the help of her friend Jenny Frazer provided a great spread for everyone to tuck into, Peter along with two great friends of his, Geoff Leeds and John Murrihy laid out the room, carted the chairs and tables up from the basement and converted the front room into a mini concert venue. It was great to be in their company John was an Ex Vietnam Army Engineer and he and I exchanged a few war stories together, we sat out in the sun, swapped a few jokes and I suffered a bit of light hearted "Pommy" bashing. Once again the friendly welcome you get from Australian folks shone through. At the appointed hour everyone arrived and got stuck into the grog, you'll notice how easily I now slip into the local dialect these days. Vin and I stayed sober!! at least until after the concert! I started the evening off and from the very first song you could tell be had a very receptive audience, I decided to give them a rest from my batch of well worn Australian songs and did a more mixed set, including Sarajevo and When Jessica Comes To Play, I did slip in my Doctor Bern ado's song Doors Ever Open about the exploitation of children sent out here for adoption. Vin's two sets were as always quite superb and the audiences love him. Punjabi Girl, Troubles Of Erin, he finished off with We May Or Might Never All Meet Here Again and everyone already knew the chorus probably have heard it from Martin Pearson who learnt it from Vin when he was a lad. seems to be a favorites out here in Oz and it was amongst a number of requests he did, he also managed to slip in a couple of requests from the Singapore gig. Very few of them had heard him before but warmed up to him immediately, he said it was by far the most friendly and receptive audience he had experienced so far. On the welfare front, Vin is starting up a new society for the voluntary repatriation of British Slugs who didn't want to come over here in the first place. He's also helping fund research into a UV sunscreen for Ozzy Slugs, which might be called Slugslime Solair.
Vin has been seen collecting the shrivelled up corpses of slugs with a view to returning them to their families in the UK. A huge thank to to everyone we met and talked to at the concert, we hope you enjoyed our music and CDs, to all the folk of Melbourne and especially to Peter and Jane, thank you for the memories and the excellent Chinese meal last night, you are both stars.