Will it EVER stop raining?

Well, of the 17 songs that my ex-boss asked me to find for his last ever assembly, he only used 6 of them! This might have been annoying, but I was expecting it - him asking me to produce music that he didn't subsequently use was a weekly feature during the 10 years I worked for him, so it was kind of endearing. Anyway, the school has now closed forever. I spent most of the afternoon in floods of tears - so did most of the rest of the staff (plus many of the kids), to be fair, but I left a year ago and I thought I got all my crying done at the time! It's hard to explain what a special place that school was, though, to anyone who didn't experience it.

To take my mind off it, the first session of the intensive choir weekend was tonight. We didn't sing through all the music, but we did a fair bit of it. Tonight we did O Clap Your Hands (in which the 1st altos go down to a bottom E flat and the 2nd altos are nowhere near as low! What's that about?), one of the Rachmaninov Vespers (the first one), and Faire is the Heaven. It was all very lovely, particularly the yummy chords and key changes in Faire is the Heaven. As usual I felt that the 2nd altos (only 6 of us tonight! Quality rather than quantity, as we always say...) won the sight reading contest, although the rest of the choir did much better than they usually do. Anyone who wants some hints, see my sight reading instructions that I wrote earlier this year :-)

Only one more thing to add: Rachmaninov had big hands!