It’s always a pleasure coming to Croydon Folk Club. Brian and Jenny are a lovely couple who run the club, always the first to arrive to set up display boards, chairs, stage, banners, ticket desk, raffle and lighting. We’d actually arrived even earlier as we came by train and everything, remarkably, went to plan. Very little waiting around, got the train from Polegate direct to East Croydon. This time it wasn’t raining so the walk from the station was ok once we’d found the right way out of the station, and took about quarter of an hour. We arrived even before the bar was open so sat outside at a picnic bench to eat our sandwiches, listening to the bustle of traffic outside the walled garden – pale purple crocus flowers were popping up all over the path so we had to be careful where we wheeled the trolley.
There was a decent sized audience and they were up for a good old singalong which was fun. We did 2 sets, one in each half after the floor singers.
The venue is a ground floor one room pre-fab hall at the back of Ruskin House which has a small raised portable stage and comfortable seats, ladies toilets inside, gents accessed from outside. The bar is in the main building so folk have to wait until the break to go to refresh glasses. There are now curtains half way across the hall which helps with the acoustics and the temperature.
Decent fee, sold one CD, made contact with someone who books for another folk club.
Will happily return but … will make sure we catch an earlier train home. We didn’t go for the last train, but made sure there were several to choose from on the way back. We just missed the first one thanks to Jim’s ticket not working at the barrier and the slowest member of staff in the world – he literally dawdled over to press the button – so we go to the platform just as the train pulled away. That’s fine as there were 2 after that, just a bit of a wait. BUT, the wait got even longer and the next train was cancelled so we missed the connection at Haywards Heath and when we got in to Lewes we hit engineering works so there was a replacement bus to Polegate. That would have been OK if it didn’t mean waiting until 2am for the first bus to arrive! We tried several local cab companies (1am and it was freezing and the staff had closed up the station so we couldn’t wait inside). Couldn’t get any cabs so resorted to an Uber which said it was 10 minutes away when in reality it came from Shoreham! The driver talked the whole journey complaining about his wife’s restraining order against him when all he did was slap her… that was an uncomfortable 30 minutes! We could have claimed for the cab ride on the insurance we took out on the ticket but when we tried to fill in the form we lost the will to live so gave up. Anyway, the evening’s fees were mostly taken up on travel but we’d STILL go back again .
