Womad 2016

Womad 2016 was lovely, and mainly erased the memory of all the rain-soaked misery of last year. Among the fabulous things and bands we saw were:

• The Iyatra Quartet, who played on the bandstand and also at an open mike night at the rather lovely Coyote Moon dome tent, which was both a cafe and an unofficial venue
• The Fallout Marching Band, who played on the bandstand and in the carnival procession
• My personal favourite of the whole festival - the wonderful trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf
• Asian Dub Foundation - politically very sound, but maybe I'm getting too old for that much noise
• The Hot 8 Brass Band
• Otava Yo, a really funny Russian band
• Kachupa, from Italy with a super Bulgarian woman doing the lead vocals
• The Hackney Colliery Band, which turned out to be much more art-Jazz than I was expecting
• Hanoi Masters, playing traditional instruments from Vietnam that were weirder than you could have imagined
• Stroud's very own Mighty John Street Ska Orchestra
• The Kate Bush-like 'The Anchoress', who swore and cursed through her set
• Heartbeat, a joint Israeli-Palestinian young people band brought into being by NGO Peace Direct, who were more impressive as a political and cultural fact than as a musical phenomenon
• Les Amazones d'Afrique, nine African women who were amazing

We actually did a dance workshop led by Mariana Pinho, who was so pregnant she looked like she might give birth at any moment; this was billed as samba but turned out to be quadrilla, which was probably all for the best as far as I was concerned...quadrilla turns out to be an easy country dance sort of thing.

We went to the Big Green Chat Show on Saturday morning, led by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Guests included: Dale Vince of Ecotricity, who was really very impressive and talked about the company's plans for green gas based on bio-digestion of grass (much better than poo, apparently); The One Show reporter Lucy Siegle (also of The Guardian); and head of sustainability at IKEA Joanna Yarrow - both also much more impressive than I was expecting.

One other thing we liked - the Paguro upcycled bags and wallets, made from old inner tubes and so on. May buy some when it's present-time.