Undoubtedly one of the highlights of the previous weekend was The Aquabal at The Hathersage Village Hop. It is quite possible that you don't know about this wonderful annual event which my wife Pat organises  in the Hathersage Memorial Village Hall, in Derbyshire. It's a grand do with lots of good food, music, dancing and workshops. The hall is next to a large 80 year old outdoor heated swimming pool and every year she books the entire pool so that we can have an Aquabal.

This is a ceilidh/ bal with a caller- our very own wonderful John Stewart. The main unusual feature of this is that the dancers are  in about 5 feet of water. This makes dancing a slow business due to the inherent physical nature of water and us musicians on dry land have to play very, very slowly. That is not easy; Pete has often quipped that “Anyone can play fast, but its really difficult to play slowly”. Try to imagine playing  the bagpipes at quarter the normal speed... and then hear the dancers in the pool shouting at you to play slower!
It's lots of fun; we dance The Waves of Tory under that name, but over the past 4 years the other dances have acquired altered names........ The Splashing White Sergeant, Sea Horses Brawl and St Julian’s Lion Dance has now evolved into St Julian’s Sea Lion Dance. We start with me calling this  and I never cease to enjoy the moment when I say “Top couple to the bottom” … take a moment to think about what this means when you are dancing in deep water!
And, inevitably, 3 years ago I developed an Aqua Bagpipe; a bagpipe that is played in the swimming pool.  When I tell people this they assume I am joking and the more I try to convince them, the more they assume I am pulling their leg. They take the view that “This speculation without occulation can hardly be comprehended” *
The Aquapipe has only ever been played at the Aquabal and the only exponents are John-Francis Goodacre and, inevitably, Callum Armstrong. It takes bravery to play this pipe as there is no possibility of practice- you have to jump in at the deep end and immediately play for the dancers. With bagpipes the conventional way produce the pressure is by squeezing the bag. Not so with the Aquapipe- the required pressure is produced by how deep the bag is held at the water level. Is not this what is called displacement? I recall that Archimedes discovered this in the bath and shouted “Eureka”. But it took about 2225 years for anyone to make the obvious logic step to develop the Aquapipe.

(For the technically minded it plays in G/C with a Bechonnet type plastic chanter made by Franz Hattink. It has a single drone in G.)

* Google translation from a Swedish account of sword dances written in Latin in 1555.
 


John-Francis plays the Aquapipe for Sea Horses Brawl in 2013