Light

This morning was so bright and sunny that I invented jobs in the garden so I could be outside: hoeing baby weeds; composting the dying bean plants; checking that the leak in the dustbin that I finished repairing yesterday was sound, and filling it with water and weeds to decompose. Despite the cold, I resented my phone alarm reminding me it was Sunday and almost time for our Zoom choir rehearsal. 

This year we were planning to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth by singing his Mass in C with our German twin choir in Bonn (where Beethoven was born) and with our French twin choir, in both Grenoble and Oxford. Of course all rehearsals stopped in March and all concerts were cancelled. But in September our extraordinarily talented young conductor, who started with us three years ago when he was 18 and still at school, restarted rehearsals. For the last few weeks he has pre-recorded himself leading rehearsals, then screen-shared them on Sundays. It's worked loads better than I could have imagined. We can't hear each other sing but somehow there is a real sense of singing together. We've now finished going through the mass and the recordings are there for any of us to go over agan if we want to, so today he planned to teach us, live, not pre-recorded, a song by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. I'd listened to it and didn't like it so coming in from the garden was hard. But the rehearsal, led from his student room in Manchester, was fantastic. In the chat we could ask him questions and point out sections we wanted to go over again. And even better, members of our twin choir from Grenoble were there too! It was heart-warming to be singing with them again.

This weekend in November is usually Oxford's brilliant LightNight. This year, events are being streamed online, which is nothing like as enticing as trudging through the streets looking for fire and listening for music. The only go-out-and-get-cold event has been asking people to put light displays in their windows so this evening Secondborn and I took the interactive map went to find some of them.