"I disagree! I'm talking about the shape of the horn, not the position."

Well, I seem to have not blogged for ages! I think I was distracted by the FA Cup Final - the buildup, then the weekend itself, then the not-being-in-the-mood-to-do-anything-cos-we-lost. I enjoyed the New Wembley experience, though - it's an impressive place, despite the less than impressive result. (The hand-driers, in particular, are amazing! This may seem a bit of an incongruous thing to say, but if you'd experienced their power you'd understand... I suspect they were specially souped up in order to balance the extreme puniness of the WHGS hand-driers...)

Anyway, here are my Wembley pictures. At least I did get to spend the weekend with a couple of friends I haven't seen in far too long, so the weekend wasn't entirely a disappointment!

Choir-related note: On the tube back into central London (which was so full that no-one could move - we were all packed in like sardines), I ended up in a carriage that was 90% full of Chelsea fans, and unsurprisingly they were in very high spirits. I had my Ronaldo shirt on, and they kept shouting "Ronaldo, Ronaldo, give us a song!" And I chickened out - I felt uncomfortable being on my own, totally hemmed in by these men... plus, one of them had an air horn which he kept blasting right by my ear, and I was actually worried that my eardrums might burst. As it was, I developed a massive headache as a result of the noise. But I kept thinking that in some way I was letting down the choir because I was asked to sing and I couldn't. How stupid is that?!

On a more cheerful musical note, I had a rehearsal last night with my band, which was (as ever) great fun. It was even better last night because our flautist, who moved to the USA a couple of years ago, was back for a visit, and all the songs sound much better with flute. The only sad bit was that Rachel was ill and couldn't make it, and that meant that she didn't get to sing California Dreaming (her favourite song) with the actual flute solo in it! Last night did show the extreme power of muscle memory, though - Anne (the flautist) hadn't played her flute since leaving the UK, and lots of the solos are much harder than the California Dreaming one (we make her play all the twiddly bits in the Abba songs - not for beginners!), yet she played everything practically perfectly! She was more surprised about this than anyone, and said that it must be because she worked so hard to learn those solos years ago when she first had to play them.

Anyway, no doubt some of you are wondering what the choir's been up to. Well, we are still learning The Kingdom. There's an awful lot of it! The concert is a week on Sunday; Wednesday this week was the first time we got almost all the way through it (we finished 10 minutes late and still didn't QUITE get to the end), and I think everyone was aware that ideally we would have liked to spend longer on several bits. Some bits are a lot more familiar than others - the tenors' big tune on page 78 ("he who walketh upon the wings of the wind") is the bit I've had on the brain for weeks, although the ladies' bit just after that ("the Lord put forth his hand and touched their mouth") isn't far behind. (Jamie said last week that that bit "shouldn't sound like Flanders and Swann... but it does!")

There are still an awful lot of wrong notes, which I hope people are going to look at before next week. From the alto point of view, lots of people are still getting "what meaneth this?" wrong on pages 85 and 95, and almost all of them are singing an F instead of a G for the first note of page 23. The most amusing alto mistake, though, wasn't either of these - it's from last week's warmup, and I'm still giggling every time I remember. Maggie was doing that exercise with the runny "nooey nooey nooey nooey nee" where we step and clap at the same time. She indicated which way to move first, and most people managed this, but most of the first altos on the front row were going consistently the wrong way, which very much amused those of us behind them. But even funnier was a minute later when we did the contrary motion scale - sops going up, altos going down - and Maggie said "bend your knees when you get to the top note... that means, of course, that you won't all bend at the same time..." Well, the movementally-challenged front row first altos couldn't cope with this at all, and they all bent their knees on the bottom note.

I realise that this may not sound like the most entertaining thing in the world, but you had to be there :p

(By the way, Maggie had told us, just before this, that the alto section solo in the Poulenc was the highlight of the concert for her and had moved her to tears. 'Exquisite' was the other word she used. Nice to be singled out for a change!)

I think many of the altos were probably cursing me this week. Firstly, at the request of another member of the choir, I asked them all to wait behind at the start of the break (even though Jamie had gone on 10 minutes longer than he'd said he would) so that she could come and speak to them about a concert she wanted some singers for - but she then went to have two conversations while they all sat there waiting for her (quite a few, unsurprisingly, refused to wait and went to have their tea anyway). I presume she'd just forgotten she'd asked the altos to wait! But then, Jamie found me and asked me if Judith and I would have a word with the altos and ask the ones who wouldn't stop chattering to please shut up. Great, I thought, they're already cursing me! (It actually wasn't as bad as it sometimes is - there were only three or four people that were talking as far as I could see - but they did indeed talk practically nonstop throughout the first half, and it was certainly distracting me, so I can imagine it must have driven Jamie up the wall.) But the talking was nonexistent in the second half, so it seems to have worked, and hopefully Jamie was happier. (Quite a few people came up to speak to me about this afterwards. A couple of them said "I don't think that was necessary - I certainly wasn't talking, and I couldn't hear anyone else either"... but the majority said "thank goodness something was said, the chatterers are driving me mad!")

Which leads me, somewhat indirectly, onto Jamieisms! The one in the title is my favourite, but it's the whole exchange that amused me. He was explaining to the sops how they should sing a particular note, and ended up saying "sing it from your rhino horn". Pat said, very seriously, "surely you mean a unicorn horn?", and Jamie, equally seriously, said "I disagree! I'm talking about the shape of the horn, not the position." There then followed an explanation of positions and shapes of rhino and unicorn horns and their respective relevance to singing. It was enlightening :-)

Also last week was a bizarre request to "sing as if you're singing to an alien who's just arrived on Earth and you're trying to explain the difference between men and women". It's bizarre because the passage in question (on page 106) bears no relation to any of this! This week's best one was a request to the sops and tenors to sing as if they were Gonzo the Muppet hypnotizing a chicken.... but I also liked "I've always wondered why 'monosyllable' has so many of them."