Whilst Fiona was singing camp fire songs with a horde of screaming kids and developing a nervous twitch, it was left to me to open the doors, turn off the alarm and help get set up. Now, what was the alarm code again???? Somehow, from somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory, it came to me, although I did start off by pressing the buttons on the fire alarm system, which, as you can imagine, didn’t do much to help the situation. As the alarm tone increased in volume and doubled in speed, I almost started to panic (surely not?), but suddenly spied the control box (on the wall, right in front of me). Further furious pressing still didn’t alleviate the problem as I didn’t know which was the ‘disarm’ button. Anyway, the lesson is, when in doubt and time is short just press everything you see. Worked perfectly.
Next problem, where is the light switch? Isn’t it funny how you can look but not see? After what seemed an age and with choir members anxious to get in, I finally found it ( on the wall, right in front of me, of course).
Not the most auspicious of starts. Anyway, you lot don’t know how narrow an escape you had. As our leader had thought she might be a little late arriving, I was on standby to run the warm up. Harking back to my rugby days, I had decided on 10 press ups, 15 squat thrusts, 10 burpees and 2 minutes of shuttle runs just to get the blood flowing. Now wouldn’t that have been a sight to behold? Unfortunately, Fiona, desperate to escape the clutches of the little treasures, managed to arrive back in time and so we settled for gentle stretching and a few bottles of pop.
And so began in earnest our penultimate rehearsal prior to the big day. A very healthy turnout ensured that Grace continues to be Amazing and should be an excellent way to start our performance. I then detected a little murmur of excitement as it was decided to “leave ‘Beyond the Sea’ for the time being”. Could it be that common sense had prevailed and our enduring nightmare was about to be ended?
Anyway, with that thought in mind, we joyfully burst into ‘Perfect’ and produced a very pleasing result and another little jig from you know who. But, oh dear, we all appeared a little crestfallen when the dreaded number was re-introduced. I’d already torn my copy up, so it was doubly disconcerting. But wait, what went wrong? We got through it at the first attempt, just about in tune and just about in time. Result. Fiona was happy, we were amazed and of course, as Fiona pointed out, “it was just next to the wrong song all the time!” So, you see, the countless false starts, abrupt tailings off and disharmonious screeching were actually nothing at all to do with us. They were simply the result of Fiona putting it in the wrong place on the programme, so it’s all her fault. Now that she has rectified the problem, we are good to go. Bring it on!
After that, we sailed through the rest of the repertoire, including ‘The Prayer’ (“a million times better”) (How bad was it before???), with scarcely a backward look. We even had a little time to dip our toes into ‘Ashokan Farewell’ before rounding off with the Jubilee singalong songs. Once again, a packed programme which necessitated a couple of cooling Hens to round off the evening. In harmony Haz