Tivoli left this morning for a day off the tiles and I walked through the astonishingly beautiful ice to choir practice. The ice was singing as it thawed - a beautiful soft percussive sound I don't remember ever hearing so loudly.

Choir practice was fun. We are singing Franck's Sept Paroles du Christ which is deceptively easy. I suspect when we have our concert conductor with us next week we will discover all sorts of nuances we haven't yet spotted.

I've adjusted to singing tenor rather than alto now and have been allocated Tenor 2 (low tenor). It feels odd having men singing higher than me but I'm sure it's because an unbroken tenor voice is more convincing when it is lower. Anyway, with my post-flu gravelly voice I can easily sing along with the basses!

We are also singing Rachmaninov's Spring Cantata and I am absolutely determined to use the opportunity to learn the Russian alphabet for the third time in my life. The last time I learnt it (along with some some basic Russian) was on a magnificent five-day train journey from Beijing to Moscow, only 13 years ago, and I'm embarrassed to have forgotten it. The first time was as a child, so I forgive myself that forgetting. We have a fluent Russian speaker in the choir and I'm going to exploit his skills as much as I can. I asked him today about some symbols I didn't recognise and he told me that our score is written in pre-communist script so contains some symbols that don't exist in modern Russian. I might not fret so much about those.

NB Learning Cyrillic does not mean I endorse the war against Ukraine. It is more complicated than that.