We enjoyed our first outing at St John’s, Hempton, Oxfordshire on Sunday afternoon 26 January – a lovely space with beautiful acoustics. We don’t often play at events geared for small children but hopefully we’ll do more of these in the future as the children seemed to like the music and some jigged along to the beat. When not playing, we helped the children draw around their shoes – we did this too – although some of us had trouble fitting our feet onto the A4 sheet. Then in the spirit of journeying through 2020, we thought about what we’d like to accomplish and added words or a drawing inside our foot outline drawing.

John’s Melodeon was a real hit with the smallest children, several of whom wanted to play it as the same time as John. As he has finely tuned grand-parenting skills he deftly managed this!

Annie the vicar had asked us all to think about the year ahead – a helpful all-age exercise and Paula the curate read a passage from the book of Revelation that proved to be the perfect introduction to our closing song. As we were packing up at the end, David noticed some broken church furniture which he kindly took away to fix. I think that sums us up – we love playing in churches and at any other event where we can spread some Gospel blues and country cheer – not only that, David can fix the furniture! Our thanks to Annie and Paula for inviting us to play and to all the families who gave us a warm welcome.