"We can't do the exercise where you bounce on your balls."

... said Maggie, with regret, followed by remorse when she realised what she'd said :p (Balls OF OUR FEET, in case you were wondering. And we couldn't do it because we were at the BBC, on the tiered seating of Studio 7, and bouncing tends to make it seem as if it might collapse.) (The tiered seating, not the BBC....)

More Russian tonight, surprise surprise. Much repetition of the "dirty e vowel", which needless to say I still can't do. (Apparently you have to have the back of your tongue low in the mouth. I think I have an abnormal tongue, because I can't seem to manouevre the back of it at all! Can anyone else?) We did the whole of the 2nd symphony, with the new vocal scores. I was kind of surprised that people were handing in their old scores as they picked up the new ones. I kept mine - I'll hand it in next week - because I had markings in the old score, and I wanted to transfer them. I can only assume that either most other people didn't write anything down last week (or last night), or that they don't mind making the same mistakes twice. (Good grief, I'm insufferably condescending, aren't I? Sorry about that.)

Jamieisms: "Sopranos, can you look gormless for a minute? Some of you look like you're trying to grow beards."

"There is NO y. But Jamie, there's a Y! I know there's a Y...."

And then it was the EGM. And, thank goodness, the subs motion was passed. But I spent the second half of the rehearsal wondering why on earth I bother being on the committee. I tried to answer some questions from some of the altos during the break, but I was totally unsuccessful at this, as whatever I said just seemed to get them even more angry. Afterwards, I was pretty upset, and while mulling over my incompetence I kept thinking back to last Tuesday night, when there was yet another long committee meeting, to discuss the subs proposal (yet again). Yet again I waited right till the end in order to raise a non-subs-related issue that members of the alto section had begged me to raise on their behalf. Yet again this caused me to arrive at the station just after my train left, with the next one an hour later. (We meet once a month as a committee, and I can't remember the last time I didn't just miss the train.) On this occasion I was less than a minute late, and I saw my train's lights in the distance as it sped away. And the next train had an engine failure and was half an hour late. So I spent an hour and a half on Victoria station on one of the coldest nights of the year, and (unsurprisingly) caught a cold which is only just receding. I had to get up an hour early the next morning in order to do my lesson preparations that I'd been too tired to do the night before. And the benefits of me doing all this? Somehow I can't see that there are any.

Anyway, to finish on a more positive note: a couple of people have told me they've had trouble viewing the Honda choir ad on the Honda website, so you can download it here (QuickTime file, 9.4 MB) or here (Windows Media Player file, 8.9 MB but lower quality - try only if the QuickTime file won't play). (I told Jamie about the ad yesterday, by the way - he hadn't seen it, or heard about it. His response, when I described it to him: "I can't believe they didn't ask me to get involved!")