BAH-HUMBUG!

The excitement of the Electric Prom is now almost completely behind us, although it’s being televised tonight (Saturday) on BBC2, so we do still have the “who looks like the biggest numpty” competition to come. I will report in full on the results next week! (Unless it’s me, in which case I will never mention it again). So we are now onto rehearsals for our next concert, which is, of course, Christmas. Up and down the land, choral singers everywhere are already harking the herald angels and wondering what exactly figgy pudding is. We were almost completely carol-less last year, so this year we’re going to make up for it with not one but two concerts packed full of Christmas cheer. David-the-Conductor has asked for suggestions from the choir for what we’d like to sing in our Christmas concert, and I’m delighted to see that Swayne’s “Starlight” is already on the list (“People of Planet Earth, hear what I say”!), although I think that whoever suggested Bohemian Rhapsody is likely to be disappointed.

I love Christmas carols, but not in November. I get pre-christmas rage when I see trees in department stores. It’s still AUTUMN you weirdos! So even though we tempered the premature Christmas jollity with bits of The Dream of Gerontius, I was still not in the best of moods at choir this week. And as always, when I’m a bit grumpy, I began to passively resist the situation. I diminuendoed when I should have been crescendoing. I emphasised off the beat notes. I sang random women’s names instead of the lyrics. It cheered me up no end, but thinking about it afterwards, I’m actually quite concerned. How come no-one noticed that I was belting out “Beryl and Flo” instead of “peril and woe”?? David-the-Conductor didn’t stop us even once to say “no no, that’s BURIAL, not MURIEL”. I am clearly not contributing much to the overall sound of the choir. But maybe I just need to get more strategic. The soprano section is too huge and solid to be undermined easily by one rogue scrooge. Maybe I should move to the tenors.