Echolalia

I was in a bit of a panic through most of yesterday. I was singing at Shul this morning but I hadn’t really had the chance to look through the music or practice as much as I would have liked. It’s actually really very lovely to flex my bassy singing muscles again. I can feel my voice responding really well to being given a regular work out. As it happened, everything went very well and I needn’t have worried. I still stumble over the odd Hebrew word, but everything else was pretty much spot on. 

Yesterday was spent rushing about buying and making props and then working on a quiz where all three of our computers simultaneously crashed. Through extremely quick thinking and a whole heap of team work, we narrowly avoided the entire evening grinding to a halt, but I walked away feeling like I’d been hit by a bus as the adrenaline spike slowly seeped out of my body. It’s funny how no catastrophe can ever be attributed to a single event. During last night’s quiz, Sara, who was inputting scores, ran out of battery on her laptop but realised with horror that she’d forgotten her charger. Abbie then handed her a flash drive so we could quickly save the scoreboard and transfer it to my Mac, but it was corrupt. It wouldn’t open on my computer, it destroyed the original document on Sara’s computer and then caused Quiz Master Abbie’s computer to completely crash, which meant she had to make up questions on the fly whilst Sara and I desperately tried to remedy the scoring situation. We got there...

I traveled home on a late night bus from Dulwich to the tube at Brixton. I hate the south of London. I don’t understand it at all. It seems to be a network of wide, house-lined streets with no discernible village centres. Those who know me well will know that I suffer from a condition called echolalia, which is similar to Tourette’s and involves me randomly mimicking phrases I hear which surprise me in the way that they’re delivered. It maybe occurs once a week, and it tends to happen with shop keepers and waitresses, particularly people with very high speaking voices or Eastern European accents. Anyway, I subjected Abbie to priceless example of my infliction on the bus last night as some poor girl got off and thanked the driver. I was mortified.

The tubes at midnight on Friday are always full of eccentric revellers. A massive number of people, perhaps as many as a hundred, were singing and dancing along with a busker performing Aretha Franklin’s Freedom.

The funniest sight I witnessed was an extremely depressed-looking woman, folded up in her seat like an old jumper, wearing a hat made out of a balloon flower. A tragic juxtaposition!