Rehearsal

Our concert tonight was in the Town Hall so that is where we've been rehearsing today, along with trapped pigeon flying, apparently quite happily, from one side of the balcony to the other. I put myself next to Bettina who tolerated all my smartphone use yesterday. Very confusingly, the combined Anglo-German choir is working from two different scores. Bettina has a third, has not marked up the cuts and has been to very few rehearsals. So she was not in a position to complain at today's textfest with Firstborn who needed to get some house keys from me on his way to a funeral outside Oxford. Our rendezvous failed, partly due to delayed trains, but as things turned out it didn't matter.

We were all asked to leave the hall while the Pest Control people attended. They would not say what their technique was but when we returned after an extended lunch break there was no more pigeon.

It is very clear that all of us - the East Oxford Community Choir, the secondary school singers from Bonn (who will not stop talking) and the youth orchestra from Leiden - are rank amateurs but we enjoyed rehearsing and our concert this evening, though meagrely attended, was a lot of fun. I planned to go back home afterwards to pack but was persuaded out for a quick pint with a couple with whom I have previously stayed in Bonn along with Bettina and her husband who happens to be a colleague of my longstanding friends. And of course one pint led to another and a very convivial evening. Then Firstborn texted and joined us all at the pub after the wake he'd been at.

This is a desperate picture but this is a back view of Theresa Klose who was once a pupil at the school we are twinned with and who is now a professional soprano. I sang with her when she was still in the school choir.