Ah, New Year and the beginning of the spring term. Sunday evening gloom descends and we face being Back to Normal.  You were fed up of watching TV with a third of the screen blocked by twigs and fairy-light reflections, but now the room looks a bit bare.The hoover is full of pine needles and so are all your carpets.

After all the feasting and company, the extravagance of Christmas, it’s a time of sobriety and belt-tightening – the old clothes and porridge of the title.  This week we realise that just getting to work, buying food and eating and washing up and having clean socks takes most of our time and the practicalities of training for a marathon or writing a novel – all our grandiose resolutions – just seem impossible. It’s very easy then to feel we’ve let ourselves down and nothing is going to change. This is the time when I get my diary out and try to carve out spaces for things that are important to me, to make sure they happen.

So I would say my mood is now preparing to go back to the old routine while trying to be just a bit better at things that matter; trying not to spend more time than I have to on things that don’t matter.

What’s this got to do with choir? It’s one of the things that is very important in my life. I think it’s fair to say the choir finished 2014 on a high. At Christmas we do a lot of performances at venues and events we’ve been going to every year more or less since the choir began, so I found myself thinking back over all the St Paul’s carol services, all the Carfield Festive Fairs. (That one may have changed its name a few times but it’s the same throng.)  The first year that I was in charge we struggled to get through three or four songs in very simple arrangements. Now we can do a set of eight, including a couple of tricky ones.  The sound of the choir has improved without question, and although more people are performing now, that isn’t the only reason. The quality of singing at events like the Zest Christmas Fair with only nine of us was great, confident and together. Individual singers are more confident and rely less on others – or to look at it another way, more people feel like leaders rather than followers.

This change has happened little by little over the years, from people turning up and singing, as often as they could, listening to themselves, other people and the choir as a whole, trusting me to ask only what they could achieve. I’m hugely proud of the choir and I’m looking forward to what we can do together in 2015.

My aims this year for choir are:

The usual one of choosing good songs, a good mixture so that there’s a good chance of everyone liking some of them.  I am aiming to do songs that are not too complicated so that we can spend time getting to know them really well and sing them with expression and belief rather than a vague terror that we’re going to forget them.

I would like more people to hear the choir but I haven’t worked out the details. We will be going to Street Choirs in Whitby in July and we are going to put on a good show – but I want to do something in Sheffield, preferably S8, as well.

i also want to make sure that even if we are a bit more performance-orientated than we were in the old days, that every rehearsal is fun and worth coming to, and that everyone feels welcome even if they are brand new or can’t come every week. I do want the choir to be a place where anyone who wants to can come and sing, and get better at singing the more they do it.

This is just a very quick update with a list of our Christmas gigs.  We are performing in a variety of settings in Sheffield this year, mostly in our home patch of S8.

We will be performing at:

Carfield Primary School Festive Fair – Saturday 29th November 2pm

Weston Park Museum, Western Bank – Sunday 7th December, 2pm

Church of the Nazarene, Fitzroy Road, Heeley – Sunday 7th December, 6pm

St Paul’s Church, Norton Lees – Sunday 21st December, 6pm

Meersbrook Bowling Club, Shirebrook Road – Monday 22nd December 8.30pm (after singing in the streets from 6.30/7)

This is a funny little half-term for choirs. I know some people come back to rehearsals and Boom! it’s straight into the Coventry Carol and Masters in this Hall. Christmas is such a huge singing festival that it can take over your whole post-summer life – but I don’t really like starting too early.  I try to make sure we have something to work towards in October, then we can dive into Wassailing and rest-you-merry wholeheartedly till the end of the year.

We always sing at our local Apple Day, which takes place in the walled garden of Meersbrook Park . So we enjoy finding one or two apple-based songs to put into the mix there, which we combine with other songs we already know. This year it’s on Sunday 12th October, which is quite late, and we started rehearsals on 1st September, so we’ve got plenty of preparation time. In addition to that, we are going to sing at Scarsdale Grange residential home. Singing in residential homes is not uncommon for volunteer choirs, but what excites me about this gig is that we are sharing the stage with a choir of residents. I’m delighted that they have an activity co-ordinator who is bringing music as a creative, active recreation rather than a purely passive one. They have been meeting for a few months now and have learnt some of the songs from “The King and I”, so we are learning some Rodgers and Hammerstein too, from “The Sound of Music”.

I love musicals and I’m not ashamed who knows it. I know a lot about them and it annoys me when people dismiss them as froth which avoids the serious issues of life.  They deal with some big, difficult subjects (in those two alone, you have culture-clash, polygamy, slavery, dysfunctional parenting, religion and Nazis).  The happy endings are hardly ever cloudless (as a young woman I wept with Liesl realising that the dashing telegraph boy of I am Sixteen was a Nazi).

However, I know that this is a very particular genre of music – some choirs sing nothing else but we are proud of being eclectic. Some people just find it – corny, cheesy, syrupy. Doh, a deer and Edelweiss, combined with Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree,  are brightly major and predictable harmonically, and I felt we needed a little piquancy. This week we started learning “Apple, Apple”, a Hungarian tune written by Matyas Seiber, which is as delicious as marmite after a honey sandwich. It’s full of crunchy harmonies and melodic lines that don’t quite go where you expect. The whole thing is really satisfying and I hope adding it to the programme will make it feel completely balanced and complement the other songs so that each will shine in its different way.

Well, the Bank Holiday is over, it’s back to school next week and our rehearsals start on Monday 1st September.  See you at 6.30pm at Carfield Primary School as usual!

I quite like this time of year, when if you are involved in education it’s the start of a new year and you are getting yourself ready.  New school clothes, shiny new pencil-case, the slight nervousness and the determination that this year, you are going to be better organised, work harder, and do better.  I’m usually back in my old habits of doing too much, not finishing one thing before I start another and never tidying up, by the October half-term. But this week at least, I feel more in control and excited about the new term and returning to projects like choir which have a break over the summer.

Summer 2014
Every summer we sing at the lovely Summer Garden Party in Meersbrook Park Walled Garden.  We have sung here in sunshine, showers and heavy, heavy rain. It’s always a brilliant atmosphere with cake and music.

This year it was on the 1st June 2014. The weather was beautiful and the atmosphere unbeatable – do come along next time. As well as cake there were really good felafels and you could make your own mini-well-dressing in the top garden.

Spring 2014
On April 6th we sang out in our local parks – Meersbrook Park and Heeley Millennium Park. We are so lucky to have beautiful green spaces like this on our doorstep.

On March 22nd we sang to support Liam Garcia on the Long Well Walk. He is walking from Sheffield to Cape Town to raise money for clean water projects in Africa.