"That was absolutely fantastic... but..."

(that's the favourite saying of Andrew, our recording engineer!)

While we're on favourites, Mark mentioned in passing tonight that the orchestra's two favourite bars of The Music Makers are apparently "world losers and world forsakers"... which are a cappella! Not quite sure what to make of that!

Anyway, the first night of recording went fairly well. Finished exactly on the stroke of 9.30 (someone asked me last week if there was any chance of any of the sessions finishing early - I laughed at her :p ) and by then we'd got halfway through, just up to the bit where the soloist sings for the first time. (She wasn't there tonight, so they can't have planned to get any further.) I figure tomorrow night will be the second half and Thursday will be lots of patching. Disappointingly there wasn't as much time for reading as there usually is in recording sessions - we sang most of the time. Maybe tomorrow (not that I don't like singing, it's just that I have a lot of stuff I need to read this week) :-)

Incidentally, the place where we stopped tonight (figure 48) is what I've labelled in my score as the "Christmas bit". It sounds incredibly Christmassy to me - now if only I could work out what it is that it reminds me of exactly!

Mark told us when we arrived, btw, that he was very pleased with Thursday's gig; "I thought you covered yourselves in glory, and many other things besides!"

Oh, and two different choir people asked me today what a blog is. Short version: it's not an acronym, it's short for "web log" and is basically an online diary. Skip the rest of this post if that is a full enough answer to the question for you!

Longer version: Some blogs (like this one) just ramble on about stuff, in the same way as a normal diary; others (like Blog of a Bookslut) are mainly collections of links to interesting stuff their owners have found on the web. Many blogs have a theme and are hence useful for keeping up with news in that area (e.g. The Leaky Cauldron is a blog about Harry Potter, and has so many contributors that you can guarantee that if there is some Harry Potter news, they will have it in minutes. Saves time looking elsewhere!) There are 3 main useful features of blogs: 1. Anyone in the world can read them (unless they are password protected) so they're a good way of communicating with lots of people; 2. The comments feature enables interactivity; 3. The fact that it's easy to include website links means that instead of describing everything in detail, you can direct people to other websites that have all the information already there.

If you want to know more, see here or here or here. Or the extremely comprehensive Guardian report on blogs. Or better still, try reading a few. I can recommend any of the ones listed down the right hand side of this page. Brief summary follows:

James and the Blue Cat - written by one of the writers of "Green Wing", but otherwise just general stuff; makes me laugh!
Neil Gaiman - by a fairly famous author (this is one of the longest-established blogs on the web)
Blog of a Bookslut - news from the literary world
The Leaky Cauldron - Harry Potter news
Random Acts of Reality - written by a paramedic
The Policeman's Blog - what it says on the tin
Making Light - written by a US book publisher; mainly general stuff though
Beyond Northern Iraq - written by a BBC reporter who lost a leg while covering the Iraq war
Fluxblog - an MP3 blog (has songs available for download, changed most days)
Baghdad Burning - written by an Iraqi woman living in Baghdad
The Alien Online - written by an ex-bookseller, mostly about science fiction (books, TV, films etc.)
The Woolamaloo Gazette - written by a bookseller, but mostly general stuff; Joe is, however, famous in the blogging world because he was fired by Waterstones as a result of (fairly harmless) comments he posted on his blog

Well, that was a longer post than intended; now I need to sleep. And guess what - still no essay done! Shame on me :-)