My guitar hangs on the kitchen wall of a farmhouse above Hebden Bridge, on an iron hook that was put there a hundred years ago for a ham, and it’s still in my tuning.
Nobody’s touched the pegs since we came up. I play it most days, in the front room, and I bring it back and hang it up, and the two lied-to strings are where I left them every time. The kitchen’s warm from the range and the wall doesn’t get the damp, and the farmer’s wife, who let us the house for November and December at a price Hal described as a kindness to the arts, said the ham used to keep all winter on that hook, so a guitar should be fine.
The farmhouse is at the top of a lane you go up in first gear, with a field in front of it that falls…
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