I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Unexpected Delights When we moved here, we were expecting many things: visits to castles, new museums, theatre, and all the historical panoply associated with living in a country with so much history jammed into such a comparatively small space. What we found as well were small unexpected delights. My supervisor in York recommended we go to the Christmas Panto; we did, loved it, and have been to the York Panto every year since except for one - and we went to the Cambridge Panto that year instead. We found St Andrew's West Dereham, a lovely 12th century Round Tower Church, about which I have previously written. My wife's job with an arts organization in Ely, while often a trial, also provided us with a few lovely, unexpected delights. One of the greatest was to introduce us, both literally and figuratively, to Boo Hewardine. Boo Hewardine is a phenomenal songwriter and performer who was utterly unknown to us before someone at my wife's office played some of his work. Since then we've seen him perform several times in venues ranging from a hundred or so seat house in Waterbeach, to the gallery itself and an audience of perhaps forty-five. We've also seen him play with Eddi Reader, herself no slouch as a performer, in a medieval guild hall in King's Lynn with the rain pouring down outside. Eddi had a hit with a version of Boo's song 'Patience of Angels,' which is as good a song as was ever written, frankly. Eddi's version is a little more up-tempo, than Boo sings it. You can find studio recordings of Boo's version, but the less produced live versions, like this one - Patience of Angels - are even better. (At least in my opinion.) In the late 80's, he made an album with Darden Smith, and this year, they did a tour of the UK singing some of the songs off Evidence and some of their solo material. They played at the gallery, and I ran such lights as there were - house up/down, mostly, but I did redirect some of the gallery lights to give a spotlight feeling. Here they are, from later in that tour, singing All I Want is Everything, my favourite of the Evidence songs they played that memorable night in Ely. Boo has moved recently to Glasgow, and so this Christmas he is making his farewell appearance at the Maltings in Ely. We'll be there. If you already knew Boo, then hopefully this was just a pleasant reminder. If you didn't, then perhaps this was an unexpected delight for you as well. Luddite'sLog, 27 October 2019 © 2019 Jeff Berry

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