The Weekend.

What A weekend! Of the last 5 days I have spent 4 away from home & now I'm just exhausted. Band & choir are a given but Saturday I took Liddy into town for her first game of the season. Not only did we miss the boat we should have come home on, the next one broke down & was running 20 minutes late. Bad enough but we got home to find Ditz still awake, too excited about getting her choir uniform & first performance to sleep properly. Knowing we had an early start & a big day I was less than impressed!

We were up by 6am Sunday for an 8am boat. I drove us into town from where we were going to catch a train into the city. Train terminated 1/2way & we changed to buses. I hate buses. They make me sick. So we weren't put out where we were expected to be & had no idea where we were. I took pot luck on remembering vaguely where we needed to be & we set off. Mall found without trouble, a small mirical in itself. We then began looking for the Chiefly. Naturally it was way down the other end. We read the notice informing us which level we needed to be on, hopped in the lift & Ditz, who had read only the first part of the notice, shot us up to the 21st floor. At this point we discovered the floor we actually wanted wasn't listed. Ditz shot us back down, laughing hysterically at the look on my face as I left my stomach bedind! We clambered out, found the right lot of lifts & eventually ended up where we were meant to be.

The rehearsal went for an hour, mostly practising walking Ditz complained, then lunch & a uniform handout all for 10 minutes of suspect glory. Ditz was mightily put out! We left halfway through the presentations as as I knew the trains still weren't up & running so we would be travelling for hours ~ & so we were. More than 12 hours after we began we walked back in our own front door. I headed straight for bed.

The older I get the less I like big cities. I am used to a fair amount of personal space & having to sit for an hour squeezed between two strangers nearly had me ready to commit violence. I missed my trees, the smell of fresh, clean air, being able to gaze peacably into the distance without seeing interminable concrete. I hate the sound of traffic. The best sound all day was the willy~wagtail chirruping happily around the marina.

As for Ditz's performance ~ this is a pretty professional choir. They looked & sounded great, & manage an almost unearthly other~world sound when they sing their older pieces. The audience was made up of music buffs: more than 500 of them, but as the opening bars of Christas Natas Est began an electrified ripple ran through the audience. Yep, they did good.