"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in the old man's hat..."

Ah, my favourite things about Christmas... eating chocolate for breakfast, falling asleep after dinner with my paper hat over my face, rubbish telly... and starting to sing about snow and sledges in September. As anyone in a choir will know, the festive season always begins early for us singers. By the time you actually get to Christmas Day you never want to hear another carol again and as for that song by Slade (you know the one), well, I wouldn't want to describe the sort of emotions that dredges up. However at this early stage in proceedings songs discussing the pros and cons of knitwear and woolly scarves are still very welcome.

We began a jollyAbbie Betinis Christmas piece tonight, Run, Toboggan, Run which has some extremo tough bits particularly for the poor altos. We sops have a pretty easy time of it except that we are responsible for bringing the choir back to the original key after a wee musical dalliance elsewhere. It is, as usual with Betinis it seems, a good, challenging, pretty jazzy sort of piece.

We also looked at the Arvo Part piece again (the one that sounds like Ollie is telling us to "Bog off" - man I love singing in wacky languages!). He reckons this will be a good piece to start a concert with. All I can say is hang on to your hats dear audience and prepare to be bombarded with sound! All the best prog bands begin their concerts with a bombastic classical piece by Wagner or Britten... this is the Rudsambee equivalent.

Once again, in the absence of the piece itself, here's a fascinating insight into the mind of Part. And Bjork.



Anyways, highlight of our evening was a visit from Rach and Isabel. Now I don't know much about newborn babies (Rach filled us in on a couple of things I had never even thought about... eating hair and the like!) but generally IMHO babies look like old men or those troll dolls we had when we were kids [Chris says: Please stop accusing me of having Troll hair, everyone!]. Isabel however is beautiful - genuinely, not just saying that. Welcome to your first rehearsal wee one- we look forward with anticipation to future rendition of, say, Envoi?

That's all for now folks. Hope readers have a happy week and all.

CSw