I have played the violin/fiddle since I was four. In the twenty years since then I singularly failed to win any prizes (well, apart from the Suffolk Festival). I never got past the first round of the Young Musican of the Year. But tonight, glory came. I won the first prize in the oldest fiddlers contest in Alabama, in Frankville. And the band won best band. In the words of the bluegrass classic, we're sitting on top of the world.

Frankville fiddlers contest was started in 1926 to inaugurate the new schoolhouse they had built, and it has happened every year since in the same venue - a beautiful building, white clapboard outside and peeling beadboard inside, classic Southern architecture. We turned up on a sunny afternoon, outsiders to LA (Lower Alabama) as most of the musicians and events we go to are further north, and we are proud as hell that not only did we evidently impress the judges, the locals took us to heart. Days don't get too much better than sitting in a schoolhouse, timewarped from the 1950s, watching a buck-danccing contest.