Toward the Unknown Region

Choir practice today. We spent the whole day working on Vaughan Williams' Toward The Unknown Region. I found it especially hard as I'd missed the two evening rehearsals due to a) being too ill to get out of bed and b) being in the UK. Much sight-reading required, and it is not an easy piece. I am not generally a massive fan of RVW but I have to say this should be fairly spectacular, if not as spectacular as the Prom performance in the link above. Next week we have Borodin's Polovtsian Dances in Russian to look forward to. I was asked to take some rehearsal photos for the municipal newsletter, so here you go.

Every time you leave home in the car these days you have to calculate where the gilets jaunes are going to be. I'd already made a special trip for petrol yesterday in case petrol stations were blockaded today. I set off early and went via the exciting cross-country route through the Gorges du Congoust -- the only gilets jaunes were orange ones being worn by gun-wielding boar hunters, so I arrived with plenty of time to spare. At 8 pm, after six hours of rehearsal, I was tired and thought, "Surely they won't be blocking the autoroute at this time of night?" Wrong. Blazing pallets across the road. I had to tediously detour around the ring road and along the Nationale. I'm all in favour of the right to demonstrate, and just as critical of the Président des Riches, but I wish they'd stop bugging ordinary people like them (on the plus side, most of S's several hours of motorway driving today was free because they'd lifted the barriers). 

The meeting they'd arranged for eight representatives of the movement with the prime minister yesterday was a fiasco. Only two of them turned up, half an hour late, and one of them stamped off in a huff when the PM refused to live-stream the meeting (he's not that stupid). I think they need to up their game.