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APRIL BLOG: The Odyssey moves on, not so much with the relentless purpose of a gliding Albatross but more with the pained progress of a possum who's had his posterior flattened by an imbibed kiwi male driving a yute.

Shutting my fingers in the door at work has not helped my guitar playing and only after a couple of blackened finger-nails were finally clawed off post the anaesthetic of several pints of Guinness has my fret-work regained its former semi-competence.

These setbacks aside, after 6 months in Christchurch I feel that I am finally getting closer to the well-hidden heart of the city's folk scene.

In retrospect, I realise now that my critical tactical error on arrival was to follow my heart rather than my head in chiefly sticking to pubs serving Guinness, in the mistaken assumption that Guinness and folk may be considered synonymous. Alas, in Christchurch, pubs serving my tipple of choice seem to be only synonymous with pub bands playing the same, well-worn track-list of diabollical Irish "classics" such as "Fields of Athenrye"; "Leaving of Liverpool"; "Dirty Ol' Town" etc etc. Shall we never be set free of the out-of-control fairground carousel of Irish tunes which bedevil every four-leafed clover-bedecked "irish themed" bar which seem to have covered every continent like a vigorous yeast infection? I fear not.

A recently discovered hidden gem of a session in the city may be found in the Pomeroy's bar on Armagh Street, accross the road from the Folk Club venue. The pub itself is like a grand old rural staging coach inn, complete with wooden beams, real ales and a pleasant setting by the banks of the brown trout haunted and willow tree lined river Avon. I realsed I'd lucked out when the session leader, a quiet fellow who plays a masterful accordian, informed a pished punter that no, we wouldn't be playing "Whiskey in the Jar", before he cracked into another complex tune of one of the session member's own devising.

Fiddle, accordian, bodhran, flutes and whistles wove their way through a delightful range of tunes which left me wishing I'd stuck in at my accompanying skills on the guitar when I attended the Edinburgh University Folk Society as opposed to devoting my energies to trying to force the whole organisation to move to my local. Nevertheless, I was invited (I sense, with some trepidation from some of the older members of the session) to play a song and sang Richard Thompson's "Beeswing". I felt that even this song might be a bit too cliched for this group of coneiseurs so when (luckily) invited to sing again added Karine Polwart's "Follow the Heron" and David Francis's "Saints and Sinners". I was amazed to find that those present knew who had written and performed these songs and felt chuffed to have found a group of people (surely some of a very small number in the South Island of New Zealand) for whom a Garden Session's track list would not seem an obscure list of indecipherable songs.

With Frank Burkitt currently in transit to the Land of the Long White Cloud this session plus the expected re-inforcements from my good friend and co-presenter makes the world of the Folk Odyssey considerably brighter in the near future.

Catch you later down the Folkie Trail, Tom

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