Group Photo

I'll do today chronologically - or I'll get lost! Still quite tired after the busy week and I don't want to miss anything out!

First off, we went into town early (even before pancakes) in order to get our flu jabs - even though they advertise the clinic as starting at 9.30, we know from past experience that they start early, and we were jabbed and on our way home by 9.12.

Once home, we had our pancake breakfast (and I weighed (before pancakes) and was pleased to note that despite being laid back about eating, I'd lost another lb - obviously being busy uses up a lot of energy)!

Then we settled onto our sofas for a bit of tv and snoozing, just punctuated by the Wonderspouse doing bits of washing up and me feeding the washing machine from time to time in an attempt to make the house a bit less chaotic!

Mid afternoon I departed for London, stopping briefly at Scharwenka's on the way (more of that in tomorrow's blip - you see, I can even predict the future these days ;-))!

Then I headed to a particular pub, where I met everyone in this picture! We were all at college together - and all have a BMus degree from King's College London. It was fantastic to see everyone, both to reminisce about days gone past (and to note how little we'd all changed in the last 17 or so years) and to catch up with what people are doing now.

We're quite a varied bunch - there's a Lecturer from the Royal College of Music, a Radio 3 Producer, a Stenographer, and even a Step-Granny among this lot, not to mention a crazy woman who uploads a photo onto the interwebs every day (that's me, in the red t-shirt, next to Camilla (who was mainly responsible for organizing the evening) and Ian (with whom I shared a house in second year)).

We stayed at the pub until we'd been asked to leave 3 times, since there was so much to catch up with. We even produced a fine rendition of Hanns Eisler's ,,Eine Pappel steht am Karlsplatz'', which we all know intimately, since it was used by one of our tutors as a warm-up song for faculty choir (when you've sung something every week for 3 years, you never forget it - especially when it becomes a sort of anthem, also sung with different words (including the name of one of our favourite colleagues), in student bars, on late night tubes, night buses, most of London's major station platforms and so on). It sounded VERY different from the version linked to above, rather less serious, and in a much higher key (a bit too high, in fact, and the altos were struggling a tad with some of the high notes)!!!

Eventually, once the barman was on his knees, begging us to go because he wanted to go home to bed, we relented and went our separate ways. I took the tube back to Euston, picked up a sandwich (we'd all been so busy chatting and drinking that food had been forgotten about) and then drove home. Bedtime was around 2.30 am, not ideal after such a busy week, but well worth it for a great evening out!