Jane and I have been down to the edge of London and back today to help celebrate a 90th birthday. Part of my contribution was taking down my ukulele and contributing a few songs to the party and I was aided in that by the folder of music we collected when we were part of jUKEbox, a weekly lunchtime ukulele club made up of colleagues from various nearby departments in the University of Oxford.
I’ve got various other ukulele resources but there’s something special about that collection of songs. It is probably in no small part because I’ve learned them well by playing them week after week with other people. I imagine a lot of the remnants of my professional work have already been erased – servers being decommissioned and websites being closed down, for example – but that low pressure club continues to be a lasting legacy, a part of my musical resources and how I express myself as a musician.