Spring concert

Sunday was the return leg of the annual combined concerts with the Corran Singers (Mid Argyll, red jumpers) and the Kilmallie Singers (Fort William, blue hooped sweaters). I missed the first leg in Fort Bill because only a private Harrier jump-jet would have gotten me there in time from Ipswich.
This year’s programme was:

• Haydn – Nelson Mass
• Mendelssohn – Hear My Prayer
• Mendelssohn – Extracts from Elijah
• Mendelssohn – There Shall a Star Come out of Jacob

The full credits include:

Conductor: Sheila McCallum
Organist: Morley Whitehead
Soprano: Charlotte Sutton
Mezzo-soprano: Marion Ramsay
Tenor: Warren Gillespie
Baritone: Benjamin Weaver

Only a small audience, but then the Public Hall in Ardrishaig is not one of the west of Scotland’s top venues. In fact it’s a bit of a hole and the fact that this is it as far as arts venues go in the Lochgilphead are tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the local council to culture.

Anyway, back to the main event. Your writer is to be found lurking in the bass section desperately hoping that someone will confidently (a) be counting the intervals accurately and (b) sounding out with the right note. I like the Haydn; this is something I know I’ve sung in the past, probably as a teenage bass, and I enjoy the dynamic movement of the piece. The Mendelssohn on the other had I can quite easily never sing again. I find the Elijah musically trivial and the other pieces terribly bland. All goes to show how little of a music critic I really am (or ought to be).

Still, no major bloopers from the bass section, at least none that earn a scowl from the conductor, and we leave the field bloody but unbowed, honours even, until the next year.

Back from Suffolk

A long, but very worthwhile, trip to Suffolk at the end of last week, attending my TA training group.
Travel from Argyll to east of Ipswich either involves multiple train journeys via London, or flights and car hire and extra days travelling, or just getting in the car and spending all day on the drive, which is over 500 miles. Well, I don’t mind spending a day at the wheel providing it’s not pissing down and there aren’t any major jams, so it’s my own four wheels for me.
My preferred route is down the motorways to Penrith then across the A66 to Scotch Corner, before trundling down the variants on the A1 to join the A14 through fenland to Ipswich and the job lot of roundabouts that were inflicted on Suffolk in the cause of connectivity.
The consequence of a twelve-hour journey is that it takes several hours to stop buzzing and relax, but I’m used now to that sort of distance.
Decided to stop this time and explore the castle at Brougham, east of Penrith. A lovely red sandstone ruin all to myself – arrived just as it opened for the day – although not the most romantic of old castles. I tend to judge every castle by the standards of Goodrich in Herefordshire, which was a regular haunt in childhood and had ramparts and dungeons and moats and keeps and towers – all the stuff of happy boyhood afternoons and maternal terror.
The content of the training this time revolved around how metaphor in TA shapes our positions as practitioners. For me, being a fairly conceptual Hector, this was very interesting. It’s clear that one has to develop and refine one’s own ideas about practice and the underlying TA principles that inform it in order to become congruent in thought and behaviour.
Because of commitments back home on Sunday afternoon, the journey back was a bit of a challenge, having to leave Ipswich at five in the afternoon on Saturday and plod home in one hit (with appropriate food, pee and sanity breaks. Hit the sack at about half-past-three in the morning after a better drive than I expected. Took the M62 instead of the A66 – 36 extra miles but probably no difference in time. Still, I resent those extra miles and will probably stick to the Scotch Corner to Penrith road in the future.

Why we believe in gods – Dr Andy Thomson at American Atheists 2009

This is well worth watching.