The Christmas Party

A broadcast on behalf of the Christmas Party! An accidentally profound film about human aspiration, longing, suffering, the expression of these in literature, art and music the possibility (but by no means the certainty) of God and what that means as discussed amicably by four old and slightly tipsy friends. The sax episode “I can’t play for laughing!” steals the show - funny and musical (not always at the same time!) and I think we all come together more during that than on anything else, though we are definitely 'together' as a group throughout. Carols and Nativity poems (by U.A Fanthorpe and T.S. Eliot) and songs (Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”) offer their mixture of divine longing and wry realism, holy and broken hallelujahs, true and bum notes. And no Christmas story would be complete without a compelling modern tale of an Inn too busy cashing in to offer warm rooms of welcome. John’s emotion at the end of the Muggeridge is a revelation, a powerful ending that one doesn't expect but which resolves all the rest in a way one feels was always coming.

A Happy Christmas and A Lynn Carol from the Penland Phezants

As we reach the end of our hectic first year,  may I on behalf of the Penland Phezants wish all our listeners (including the 70 more lovely people who helped bring alive our True Story of Hereward the Wake at Elmswell History group at our last gig of the year last night!)  A Very Happy Christmas and a Brand New Year. 

Press Release: A Lynn Carol

Sedgeford folk music-storytelling combo The Penland Phezants have released a Christmas carol especially for and about Lynn.  The carol embraces the timeless message of Christmas by linking Lynn across 600 years. 

The writer of the first autobiography in English the mystic Margery Kempe lived all her life on the Lynn waterfront at the turn of the 15C. In her "Book of Margery Kempe", she describes many extraordinary visions of love and joy including one in which she hears the Holy Ghost as a robin redbreast singing merrily in her right ear!

Hear it here- https://thepenlandphezants.bandcamp.com/album/the-penland-phezants-christmas-single

The Phezants bring this story timelessly into the present amid the Christmas rush as follows. 

Now starry angels on the tree 
Grow larger in the dusk 
To heaven-blue and Eden-green 
And gold and reindeer-musk. 

And what was heard by Margery, 
The Visionary of Lynn, 
Rings out on tills for checkout girls 
Who hear that robin sing. 

The only gift left on the shelf, 
That nothing else can rise above, 
Includes all treasures, lasts forever, 
And grows when shared with others: love. 

The carol was enjoyed by a packed Lynn Minster when it was performed by a full cast as part of "Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe" last September.

The CD "Songs for Skirting Heresy" with songs (including the two featured here) about Lynn through the ages is on sale at True's Yard fisherfolk museum or online at:

https://thepenlandphezants.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-skirting-heresy-the-life-and-times-of-margery-kempe