Work on a wet day

What a dreary day this has been! I think it was dry at breakfast time, and not terribly wet when I went out to rescue a drooping rose, but the mist has been right down on the water and the rain throughout the afternoon was heavy and horribly wetting. Not that I was out until late afternoon ... but I'll come to that in a minute. I realise all that hot sunny weather has left me expecting more - it seems to have become the norm.

We took the chance of doing some work on music as we weren't being lured out by sunshine. We've got a date on Tuesday to sing with another choir, marking the anniversary of the death of William Byrd in 1623 by singing Evensong in the Cathedral of The Isles. Although some of Byrd's music played an enormous part in my initiation into singing church music, I've never sung some of the pieces, and one of them which I do recall bits of is ... fast. And besides, we're talking over 50 years ago ...

So for big tracts of today I was sitting with my music at my desktop computer playing YouTube recordings of the relevant pieces while I sang along with the first altos. I started off with one of the recordings which show the score on screen and move it along as the music progresses, but found that without my personal score markings (like the asterisks which tell me "sing this line") I was finding it too hard to keep up with the impeccable singing of The Tallis Scholars, and reverted to my folder of music instead. 

It's amazingly tiring doing that kind of concentrated singing, but sitting for hours is not how I spend my days now and by 4pm I was desperate for a leg-stretch. We gauged the rain correctly and drove through absolute torrents down to Toward Lighthouse, where it was merely ordinary sort of rain, to do a brisk two miles round the lighthouse and back to the car. My trousers were soaking by the end, but I felt marginally more human. We even did the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis before dinner ...

And that was it, really. We had a long text chat with one son and a phone call with another; they're both preparing for holidays and I've not even put away my suitcase yet from our brief stay on Arran. Thank goodness the weather wasn't like this while we were there!

I don't think it's raining now.