Welcome to the World, Baby Girl

Miss Evangeline Sara Packer has made a tardy but welcome entrance into Edinburgh society. Photographs have appeared in the Rudsambee Weekly and it is clear that this beautiful young lady will do nothing but enhance our social calendar for many years to come. She will be presented to members at some point in the not-too-distant future (or so your blogetteer presumes) but, until then, I am sure you will join me in extending the warmest of welcomes to the lovely debutante and the most heart-felt congratulations to her proud parents, AnnaLauren and Tim.

And extend also, please, crossed fingers that they get some sleep. Lots of sleep. (My husband used to watch Blackadder with our first, in the early hours when I was almost demented with tiredness and she was being demanding, and it worked a treat; she calmed down, he was amused, I got to sleep. For ten minutes. Before feeding time AGAIN).

On to Wednesday. Fifteen or so of us this week; not bad but there are quite a few scheduled to be off next week, too, so it’s just as well that our next concert is not going to be too demanding. Except that Ollie has added two new (to most of us) Gaelic songs into the programme. Somehow – beyond all the other languages that we sing – I find the Gaelic the most impossible to learn. Why is that? It’s not that I can’t say the words (though it’s best not to look at them as written if you wish to stay sane) but... well, but what? Why? Wherefore? No idea. Suffice it to say that as soon as a Gaelic piece is handed out (not very often, I am delighted to say) my heart takes an icy bath and my brain goes into flight mode. You can take that as meaning that it runs away as fast as it can or that it shuts down. Either is appropriate. It may be because, when I first joined the choir, I had to contend with a Gaelic set which everyone but me knew (and off by heart, too) and I had to learn it (and off by heart, too) very quickly and got myself into a right old tizzy about it (unnecessarily, of course). Perhaps I never recovered from this initial experience. Or it may be because I have an extreme aversion to these pieces – again, why? Absolutely no good reason for that. I actually quite like listening to them, sung well. And I love good old, jiggy Scottish music; makes me want to dance in a very lively and potentially life-threatening fashion. So – why, why, why. And why again. (Are you beginning to sense that, yet again, I don’t have much to say for myself? Funny, that).

Jenny and the other very old (!) [shall we say, Experienced?] members of Rudsambee were well acquainted with these two pieces. Jenny was given the job of telling the rest of us how to pronounce the words. She did very well, on the whole, but pronunciation lessons never run smoothly in Rudsambee rehearsals and there were some contentious moments. Everyone always knows best and when you’ve got three different versions of one word coming at you from three different corners of the room, writing down an indecipherable transliteration (OK, so maybe that’s not exactly the right word but Gaelic might as well be written in a different alphabet for all the sense those letter combinations make); writing phony phonetics down really, really badly becomes inevitable. And I have never yet had the experience of someone speaking sl-o-w-ly when doing this job. Each one rabbits on so fast that I couldn’t even write down English words that quickly let alone peculiar personal versions of unfamiliar ones. Anyway, the tunes are easy so no doubt all will be well. Eventually.

I’ve said that before. Often.

We also started work on a new Eric Whitaker piece (yum). It is called The Seal Lullaby, words by Mr Kipling – he of the poetry, of course, not the pies. It is very pretty and, unusually for us, will have a piano accompaniment so we can’t sing it in the Scottish Poetry Library (no piano) which is a shame as it is quite straightforward – I mean that ‘quite’. There are some tricksy little places which messed up what promised to be another reasonable attempt at sight-reading from yours truly. And it’s the sort of tricksiness that is not so evident when singing one part at a time but becomes appallingly obvious once any other part is added in. Sing the awkward alto bars with only other altos and – what’s the fuss about? Add in a soprano or two, some tenors and the growlers... mayhem. In my mind, anyway. But it IS only a few bars of confusion. AWBW. E.

Ollie wasn’t feeling very good – he hasn’t been feeling brilliant for a while, now, (wish him better and, like Peter Pan and the fairies, I’m sure your wishes will do the trick) so we didn’t have a long rehearsal. I think it was quite productive, though. Certainly it was enjoyable.

Afterwards we sang a belated Happy Birthday to both Heather and Susan. Very belated in Susan’s case as she was away last week when the day of the rehearsal was the actual day of her birthday. Heather’s had only been the day before.
Then, speaking of birthdays, Jenny suggested that I should be forced, I mean encouraged, to recite the poem wot I wrote for Kay’s party. Now, I just happened to have a copy of said poem with me (!) to give to Kay – something I meant to do at her party but didn’t (just as well as I have had time since to review and re-write the bits that needed serious attention) and so, in great embarrassment, I was prevailed upon to entertain my fellow Rudsambeeites with my magnum opus, A Wolf’s Tale (bad title but I haven’t thought of anything better yet). I made them laugh and I was delighted with the reception my efforts received. Gee, shucks, Guys. Thanks. There was a request made that I put the pome on the blog and, indeed, I may do so at some point, but now I have to go and pack for a visit down south (won’t be here next week btw) so such an event will have to be postponed, I’m afraid and you will have to await the literary event of the year in eager anticipation.

xxx