Ian and I arrived at 6pm last night (Sunday) - looking ahead, that’s probably about the time we’ll be here exactly a week days hence; what shenanigans will the intervening 7 days present I wonder… ;-)
Number 14 is absolutely twatting massive! 8 beds and enough floor space to host the rest of the choir (willingness to rough it on air mattresses permitting).
If there’s one emotion/state matching the excitement it’s stress. Today and the last few days have seen qute a few last minute changes to people’s circumstances meaning we’ve massively over-catered for (expensive) B&B accommodation. Fortunately the Swam were amenable to changing one of our bookings so that makes it a bit easier.
So Monday the choir line-up was: (sop) Claire, Liz, Eve, Sue, Caren, (alto) Emily, Sue P, Wardle, Ellie, (tenor) Ian, Olly, (bass) Richard C and Ben Reid. And Duncan Courts ably assisting on organ.
It was a good group but not the right numbers for the music I had chosen - Edgar Day in Bb and Finzi God is Gone Up. We had a number of teething problems today - arrival, self-locking song schools, adjusting to a new ensemble and so on - and for many reasons the music never quite settled. I think my polite but uncharacteristically cautious assessment via Twitter probably reflects how I felt about our first service.
However, we had a wonderfully sociable day including a lovely lunch courtesy of Chef West and then a cracking post-evensong knees-up in the pub afterwards (City Arms - the old gaol) and I made the most of seeing the likes of Wardle, Ellie, Duncan and Sue P who were only there for that one day. Oh, also Andy (with_the_hair) Davidson came to evensong and we managed to press gang him into singing on Wednesday.
I also had the opportunity of regaling the troops with my New Year 08 hire-car story which never fails to have tears streaming down faces.
The other comedy of the day was Olly who, having done an excellent job of the canting throughout Evensong, was taken a bit by surprise with the cue for the final responses (so was I to be fair) and consequently fumbled around for his tuning fork, struck it on the wrong end resulting in no note, finally began it but ended the first one on the wrong note, fixing it at the last second with a graceful jazz slide up a tone. Nice one Ol - heroic recovery and a classic choir-week anecdote to kick us off!
Looking forward to the next two days with some music possibly better suited to the forces.
