Pica Pica

The Tuesday session at Kelly’s stopped operating earlier this year. Partly as a result, in September we started a session at the Riverview Hotel in Balmain on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. Thanks, Sarah, for this idea!

Anybody who is particularly interested that can find out more through the session’s group at Yahoo.
It’s the nature of sessions to be unpredictable, but the first two nights have been successful, so here are a few pictures.

A general view of the pub, which you can see is “old-style”. This one was taken before the first session actually started.

New South Wales, to its shame, has an astonishing number of pokies.
The pubs and hotels depend on them for income, and the Hotels Association has made large contributions to the governing party to maintain the system of large “boofhead” pubs through an expensive licensing scheme. The State government also has become financially dependent on the large rake of it gets from these machines. Nobody likes to talk about the broken lives that pay for all this. Anyway, this pub has, I am proud to report, possibly the pokiest pokie room you will be likely to find:

Some of the players on the second evening:

And here is another view:

A star visitor on the second evening was Ruth Boylan, who had been teaching at the Gundagai festival:

And finally, another view of some of the players, lit by flashlight. This does not give such an atmospheric view, but you can see more clearly!

So far, so good!

3 April 2007. Back upstairs again in Kelly’s on King, Newtown, Sydney.

I don’t need to make many comments about most of these!

Thinking about it..

Playing and thinking:

Playing:

Even more playing:

A contributor to thesession.org/who escaped the picture three weeks ago:

More and more playing:

A slightly different angle:

Even less comment:

The audience was enthusiastic:

Not playing, dancing (though we want a harder surface):

The landlord says “Well, it is an Irish pub”: