I don’t really know how to begin writing this post, because a very sad thing has come to pass. If you read my waffle regularly, you’ll know that one of the important things in my life is the pub, not just any pub, but the pub in our village, The Dolphin. I have been known to describe it as the best pub in the world – by which of course I mean ‘my world’, The Dolphin in Uphill village, near Weston-super-Mare. I first got to know it when my Mum and Dad moved into a bungalow next door in about 1982/3. When my own family and I moved to the south-west, after my parents had died, we too lived in the bungalow for a while, before we moved to our present house which is maybe three to four hundred yards away from the Dolphin.
So for the last forty plus years, the Dolphin has featured in my life. We’ve actually lived in the village nearly twenty-five years now, and through the Dolphin we have met so many friends and friendly people. We started coming to the weekly quiz and through that we met and made even more friends – real friends, not just lovely acquaintances. My husband was one of the founder members of a band which grew out of folk night, Celtic Shambles – Celtic the genre and shambles the manner in which they played! Obviously the latter was a joke as they were very good and became the in-pub band but also gigged elsewhere across the region.
The quiz led to something else: one of the chaps in our team and my husband joined a shanty group. The Beach’d Buoys became popular performers, and of course that led to much more, for both of us – gigs, festivals, weekends away. Out of the shanty group grew the ukulele group, and now husband gigs with them several times a week, and most recently, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, an annual trip to Sidmouth to play in their folk festival.
I’ve written a great deal about quiz night, and this sounds a really silly thing to say (unless you know the Dolphin quiz) but it has been a really important feature of my life. It’s not only fun, but it’s interesting, another thing to keep me mentally active. Through the quiz we’ve got to make a variety of friends in other teams. The noisiest and most ebullient is the one we have sat next to for donkeys’ years, the Bleadon Players, a local amateur dramatic group. We support them every time they put on a show, and it’s only because of the quiz that we met them.
The quiz has been something I look forward to, and over the last couple of years my writing friends, Macaque and Fenja Hill have joined our team. Also in our team are our great friends, Pip and Rob Perryman – who you may have seen on BBC’s ‘Escape to the Country’. They arrived in Uphill after spending a year on a canal boat called ‘Frog in a Bucket.’ It’s not just writing, am-dram, canal boating, music – our team has two artists, my husband and also the very talented Fiona Esmarch, who I think I mentioned having painted a portrait of my great-grandmother from a fading picture. I had.
So… we have known for a while that changes were afoot at The Dolphin, new management taking over from the lovely family there at present, yes we knew changes were afoot… However… it seems they are far more radical than any of us imagined. The pub will close for refurbishment, and I think we all realise it needs it, comfortable old place that it is. Although we obviously have no idea what changes will take place, we fear that those changes might be more fundamental and momentous than we might hope . I have mentioned before a “friend” from Canada who followed me here on my blog, and was fascinated by the Dolphin, loving my tales from the pub. Sadly I believe he has died, but one of my first thoughts when I heard the news and reality sunk in was ‘heck, what on earth will David think!‘
This post has been somewhat of a blurt – I am still in shock, to be honest, and no doubt I will write more and after more reflection.
Now we have to decide where to go when we want a beer!
https://bleadon-players.co.uk/
https://myblogfromthefrog.wordpress.com/tag/frog-in-a-bucket/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Fenja-Hill/author/B07DJQCC8D
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Hamish-MacNeil/author/B08XS9T7ZT
Lois Elsden 