Choir night

Since we retired 16 years ago, it feels as if Tuesdays have become ever more choir-practice orientated. Now it's reached the point where I can't imagine how we managed a whole day in school, two boys at home, and out to sing in the evening - but that's perhaps the most noticeable feature of getting older. 

We arrived in Dunoon almost 48 years ago now, with a new baby, regretting the loss of our octet in which we'd actually met. I joined the church choir, but it wasn't enough. We put out word, mainly in school circles (I wasn't working, but Himself was) and waited - in the music room of the Grammar School as it then existed - to see who would turn up. From that evening grew a four-part choir which we called The Hesperians. Eventually we ran out of tenors, and that was that. But the point of this story is that we rehearsed - always on a Tuesday - on top of the normal day of work and weans. We acquired an army of babysitters in the early days; in the latter period our younger son sang treble in the soprano section. It became an institution.

Nowadays we tend to do everything we intend to do up until mid-afternoon, when we eat a proper dinner and then relax till it's time to go out at 7.45pm. Even so, we find it harder than it used to be to go out and work in the evening, especially now it's dark again. But it's still the best thing - even when the choir is missing three people, as it was tonight, so that there are only 6 of us singing. We were working hard at a piece we were rehearsing almost two years ago, remembering our efforts to stay in tune for a difficult discord which tempts my part to sharpen  ... and we recalled how we were last struggling with it as the threat of this new virus seemed to crawl closer through Europe and three of us were planning holidays abroad ...

But here we are. We have a gig coming up in November and there is work to do as we get back into the music. So my blip is the view across to the church where we rehearse, only 3 minutes' walk from our front gate. We don't use the whole huge church - the hall is at the rear, on the left. 

And now I have eaten toast and marmalade and bed beckons beguilingly. Alliteration, anyone?