Quizzical

My plan to go owling today fell by the wayside early this afternoon, because reasons, and in the end I went off into Stratford with R instead, for churchyard birding, coffee, and shopping. Holy Trinity churchyard was quiet: though both the Merlin app and I could hear some Goldfinches and a Wren in the nearby yew trees, my sprinkled bird seed only attracted the Boss Blackbird (female), and the almost inevitable pair of Robins. I was hoping that the hidden Wren might decide to show itself on this monument, which lies almost inside a yew tree, just below the place where it was singing, and on which I've photographed it before. But in the end it was this Great Tit that appeared from the tree, and having posed briefly while scanning the immediate area for threats, swooped over to the nearest headstone, collected some seed, and then disappeared back into the depths of the yew.

This evening at choir we began work on Haydn's Creation, a piece I adore, which we haven't sung since November 2013. This was only the second concert this choir had performed, and we sang it with a conductor who made no concessions at all to the inexperience of his singers, which made for a pretty stressful evening - especially as I was standing so far back in the choir that I could only see him by standing on a box. In heels. But I remember with great satisfaction that whatever may have gone wrong during the more complex sections, we absolutely nailed the ending, and the up side of having sung a long piece standing on a box, in heels, with my knees literally knocking together with tension, is that I've never been nervous in any concert since. I was interested, but in the circumstances not wholly surprised, to find that quite a lot of the sections we practised tonight became quite familiar quite fast, and I'm hopeful that this bodes well for the re-learning process. 

I'm singing Haydn, and spring is just around the corner. Things are looking up.