Welcome to Francis’s new style Christmas newsletter. As usual, I don’t buy cards, but make a charity donation. The picture shows three go-playing friends and myself playing bassoon quartets at the annual British Pair Go Championship. As I don’t play the bassoon myself I played the fourth bassoon part on the serpent.

Some of my friends and relations (mainly those who are still off line) get paper copies of this. But as you can see, one of my main projects this year has been learning that mysterious language HTML. If you right click on this web page and then select “view source” you can see all this gobbledigook. You seem to need a lot of HTML for not much web page.

In other respects the main change this year has been in Judith’s life, rather than mine. In August she retired from her post as Senior Lecturer in English Language Support at the University of Middlesex. This has left her more time to devote to her post as Amie Visiteuse (Visiting Friend) to the French Quaker organisation, and to pursue a new interest in Early Modern English. She has been working as a volunteer at Friends House (the Quaker HQ) in London conserving and indexing 17th Century Quaker tracts. This has led her to consider some formal linguistic research into the language of these documents. There are some 40,000 of them. Watch this space. And as if that wasn’t enough to keep herself busy, Judith has taken up playing the Baroque oboe.

Judith’s work with the French Friends, as Quakers call themselves, took us to the village of Congénies near Nîmes for our annual holiday together. In Congénies stands the oldest purpose-built Quaker Meeting house on the Continent, and a cluster of Quakers, both French and British ex-pats, is growing up around it. The building has only recently returned from private ownership to Quaker hands, and is being refurbished. We both drove off on four days for the 45 minute journey to La Gardiole, a Catholic centre where the French Quakers held their Assemblée Annuelle, or jamboree, leaving me free to explore or sit in a room with my laptop. A retired French priest there was asked if he were a Quaker. “Dieu me préserve”, came the answer. We are returning to Congénies for a French Christmas, and are probably there as you read this.

I continue to research and edit West Gallery church music. By the time you read this I should have uploaded to my website the product of my latest research; a complete edition of the published anthems of John Bishop (1665-1732). I serve on the Committee of the West Gallery Music Association, and I am doing my best to steer that organisation towards a more outward-looking attitude than I feel it has had in the past.

London Gallery Quire continues to take up much of my time. We celebrated our tenth anniversary this year with a suitable party, and the issue of our CD “Praise ye the Lord”, with 20 West Gallery tracks. The production of that was a saga in itself. The whole project took nearly two years. To tell you of just one hurdle: the recording engineer disappeared to Brazil as the project neared completion.

And I continue to run West Gallery workshops for any that want them. The most ambitious project this year was a weekend at Epworth, to celebrate Charles Wesley’s tercentenary. This entailed a workshop, a concert, and service the following morning, using mainly locally recruited singers and instrumentalists most of whom had not performed West Gallery music before. It all went surprisingly (to me) successfully; I was especially gratified by the good attendance on the Sunday morning.

My go playing is taking something of a tumble at present. I am entering tournaments at 3-dan at present, instead of my former 4-dan, and finding even that grade hard work to maintain. Old age I expect. But it didn’t stop me from entering the European Go Congress at Villach in Austria this summer. Villach is an attractive town near the borders with Italy and Slovenia, which I reached by a route including a scenic rail journey from Salzburg through the Alps.

In an otherwise well run event, the organisers had forgotten about the traditional go song party on the last Friday evening. We were chucked out of the congress centre at 10.00 pm, and the Villach police were very hot on external noise. So we ended up in a dark midge-infested field several miles out of town singing by torchlight. The picture shows two of my German friends singing the 30-verse European Go Congress song.

My teaching career still enjoys its Indian summer, with a day and a half per week of music teaching at Larchwood Primary School near Brentwood in Essex. More about that on the website.