Evening light

It looks quite nice up in the Cotswolds, doesn't it?

It wasn't nice. At all. I gave up and came home about eight hours ago, and I still haven't properly warmed up. But, you know, self-inflicted wound and all that. I don't need or expect sympathy; it would just have been nice if something (other than a large number of corvids) had decided to fly around for a while. It's pretty generally accepted among the masochists lining The Wall that we must all be afflicted with a kind of addiction, or we wouldn't keep putting ourselves through the discomfort and frustration - especially as the older of the old lags are also agreed that almost no-one has ever taken a decent owl photo before January.

Sigh.

Actually, it's not strictly true to say that I haven't been warm since I took this: there were a few minutes this evening, during the penultimate rehearsal for our concert tomorrow evening, when the combined stress of the closely-packed sopranos and altos sent the temperature in Chipping Campden Parish Church soaring. I keep telling myself that we've performed more difficult programmes than this, but I'm struggling to remember what they might have been; certainly we've never done as many unaccompanied pieces as we'll be singing tomorrow night, and if we can hold our pitch steady through them all it will be a little pre-Christmas miracle.

Having said which, there is some utterly beautiful music in this programme (my favourite is Crossing the Bar, and I'm not surprised that almost all the reserved tickets have been sold. I just hope that everything will come together at the final rehearsal, so that we can do the music and the occasion justice.