Sunday
Sunday starts off with the obligatory breakfast at the Unicorn. My arteries are going to be pleased when the festival's over, so are my feet. Suitably topped up with egg, beans, bacon, sausage etc it's time to head to the site for my first item of the day, Eric Bibb's Guitar Workshop at the Club Tent.
It's dry as I walk across the field but by the time Eric starts the first shower of the day has arrived. It's not so much a workshop, more a lecture with tunes, interspersed with questions.
Eric has so much knowledge, not just of how to make the music, but its history and context. One of Eric's key bits of advice to pickers, make friends with your local nail bar. Eric offers up a short prayer to nail bar workers. Apparently nail glue is very toxic.
Eric has got a wicked sense of humour that adds to an already impressive knowledge base and leads to a really fascinating workshop. I'm not a guitarist, talk of c chords and d chords and fifths goes straight over my head, but as Sunday mornings go, you could do a lot worse than listening to Eric Bibb, he even found time to lob in a gospel tune.
Needless to say he's attracted a big audience and one that has a deep understanding of the subject. Eric seems to really enjoy his banter with the crowd. I'm sure he could have kept it up pretty much all day and comes close to having to be pulled off stage.
Staying up at the Club Tent means that I've missed the Sunday morning broadcast of The Archers. My annual exposure gone without a trace. Another thing I have to miss this year is the banana milkshake, there doesn't seem to be any on site.
Lisa Knapp starts off the day on Main Stage. She opens with "The Blacksmith" as she did the night before, but it's as though the song has taken on the sense of occasion, it's bigger and somehow more dramatic. It seems there is a variation on Boyle's Law at work. "Music will expand to fill the space made available to it."
Despite the larger stage, Lisa seems more confident in herself, maybe her performance and the reaction to it the night before had brought a sense of self assurance, whatever it was it worked.
It's time for a song that Lisa wrote whilst in her kitchen whilst being kept awake by a bird. It's a song that could have been written at almost anytime. It's the way Lisa Knapp handles the whole song experience that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries.
The song could easily be played as a solo piece on either guitar or fiddle, it gets an outing on autoharp, because that's what it needs.
Another change in the weather brings with it warmth and increased humidity. It's starting to feel close and clammy. It's difficult to keep the instruments in tune under such conditions. Having taken off her cardie, it's time to give the fiddle a bit of attention as it's been waiting for its turn to be used again.
Lisa does a good job of bringing the site to life. Her songs have proved their suitability for all sizes of stage. Hopefully this will help catapult Lisa to bigger and better things.
Yesterday I'd seen one Irish band, Kila, try to drain the life out of Irish music. It was like the scene in a horror movie where the vampire has sucked the blood out of the heroine's best friend at the end of a regency ball. What takes her place is a very pretty, but soulless shell.
Beoga, ironically the Irish word for lively, rush in before the pallid corpse takes its final breath and start to put spirit back into the body.
Hailing from County Antrim, this five piece is everything a top traditional band from Erin should be. Actually any good band should be.
I'd heard a couple of their songs during The Session the day before and knew that this had the potential to be something special and it was. Beoga quickly form a relationship with the audience and play on it mercilessly.
They feel very spontaneous, yes the core of the song is there, but you feel they could shift it down a side alley anytime they wanted to. It gives the music an edge to it that keeps it fresh, it's also going to get me along to the Proper Records Stall and buy a copy of at least one of their albums.
The between song patter is different as well, yes the theme is the same, but the words take it off at a tangent.
The biggest thing you notice about Beoga is that they play with a twinkle in their eye. They're enjoying what they're doing and want you to have fun to. They also play the only bodhran solo that I hear all festival.
They're a very keyboard driven unit, one conventional plug in, two others via accordions. It's what gives the band their energy and distinct core sound. Beoga are a band to keep an eye out for.
I bump into Ade Edmondson, I knew he'd been on site all weekend as the youngest member of the Fatea team had mentioned seeing the doctor guy from Holby City and then looked bemused when I mentioned The Young Ones and Bottom, how times have moved on.
Ade has been a folk and world music fan for many years. His daughter Ella has played a set at The Hub and at the Club Tent on Saturday that I missed, but which had apparently gone down well.
It was at this point that I realised that I had missed the cutting of the cake. The only known baby born at the festival, well not actually born there, but decided that it was his day to be born, came into the world at just gone twelve on the Sunday. Family and friends gather in the Guinness Tent on the Sunday at midday to mark the occasion.