Where oh where did my big choir go?

You know when you look out of the window early in the morning and witness a day which is struggling to wake up? The grey of the sky makes everything murky and bleak. The trees in the garden are fed up, and bent double with rainwater. I even dreamed about rain. Flood waters were so wide I was preparing to get in a boat to cross them. 

I drove through the rain to Maidenhead on Wednesday to run a quiz. I've always wanted to go to Maidenhead on account of it having a bridge over the Thames with a near perfect echo. Apparently, if you stand on the footpath which runs underneath it and sing, you get a very charming effect.

This may be a useless stub end of a fact, but I think Maidenhead is also the place where Edward Vii used to woo his mistresses, most notably Lillie Langtry. We may even be able to go as far as to say that he took the maidenheads of sundry maidens in Maidenhead! Never let the facts get in the way of a good pun!

Anyway, I didn't get to visit the town itself, and ended up running the quiz in a conference room, in a business park, on an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town. Ah! The glamour! The rancid glamour!

At 3.30pm yesterday, I left Highgate for Greenwich to do my teaching at Trinity. As I walked along the river, it struck me what a special location the conservatoire is situated in. It's right by the Thames in part of the magnificent 17th Century Royal Naval college, which, I read today, has been designated an UNESCO site of "outstanding universal value." The white buildings glow a magical peachy colour at sunset. One building looked so beautiful that I had to ask one of my students if it was being lit up by lamps. They filmed the end sequences of Les Mis there.

I had spent time in the week studying the CVs of my pupils, and pouring over them for spelling mistakes and inconsistencies. If you're going to have Rodgers and Hammerstein on your CV, you ought to spell their names properly. I also wanted to make sure that no one was filling out their biogs with skills they couldn't actually back up. One of my pet hates is people claiming to play musical instruments they can't actually play to a standard which would be useful in a show. Having basic flute skills is neither here nor there. There are high class musicians who would be able to get to a basic standard on pretty much any instrument in an afternoon! It was all very good natured. We had quite a laugh after the students began to realise that none of them were going to be spared my acid tongue!

The show choir was more challenging. Last week, 120 students attended. Tonight I'd be lucky to have had half of that number. The biggest hit was the lads. We had two tenors and one bass, which doth not a choir make! Of course I couldn't fail to take it a little personally. Choirs don't usually haemorrhage members like that. I'm told the problem is that the ensemble is not a compulsory thing within the college, so life takes over and the numbers diminish. A visitor isn't able to incentivise students who might think twice about appearing flaky in front of a member of staff. It seems a bit shortsighted of the students if I'm honest. When a visiting professional comes into a college, he, more than anyone else, has the power to give them employment in the future. Lack of men aside, we had a tremendous rehearsal. At the end, we sang I Miss the Music in complete darkness but for the light of mobile phone torches. Marvellous.