Another Day in the Life of a Writer

It's been a different sort of day today. There hasn't been a lot of writing going on because I've been tied up most of the day making music with my two wind bands.

It's been the last morning of rehearsals at music centre for this academic year. For me it brought some mixed emotions. I'm always a little bit sad at the end of the year because there won't be any music centre for over two months and I'll miss playing with everyone and seeing all my friends there.

However, there's a sense of completion and satisfaction because we've made it through the whole year, we've definitely improved as musicians, and we've mastered our pieces.

Everyone's excited because it's our big concert at Huddersfield Town Hall on Monday and we've been getting our programmes ready for that.

Lots of the youngsters are being promoted to the next level next term, from Junior Band into Intermediates, or from Intermediates into Seniors, so the lucky ones who got given slips of paper with their new rehearsal details were really on a high.

Junior Wind Band was excited because we were due to perform this afternoon at the summer fair of a nearby infants' school. Not only were we playing our tunes - for weeks we'd been practising marching as well. The aim was to process through the school grounds, playing as we marched.

Marching is not something that we usually do in our music centre, so it had involved the children buying lyres to fix their music onto their instruments, at £14 a time. We had numerous marching rehearsals over the past half a term. Marching while playing, marching without playing, playing and marching on the spot. One of the dads who is a military musician gave us advice on how to march together in our rows, keeping an eye on the central person of the row of five, the anchor person. This was meant to help us keep in step, stay in our rows, and keep reasonably well spaced out. It sounded easy when he said it!

We practised marching on the paths around the outside of the music centre and even on the tennis courts (minus the nets)! We'd done just about everything we could think of to get the marching off to a T.

Of course, the one thing you can't plan for is the British weather. When we arrived for our rehearsal this morning, it was absolutely bucketing with rain, so we didn't do any marching practice.

But when we got to the infants' school in the afternoon, there was a temporary lull in the rain so we made an attempt at marching. The music centre parents and infants' school parents had turned out in full force to watch this spectacle.

Our formation stayed in place for about thirty seconds, but by the time we got halfway through our march, one of the dads, who was the anchor man for the second row, had managed to get so far behind that he ended up in the middle of the third row next to me, dragging two of his row with him. The three children who should have been in my row had been pushed out of their positions and shunted back into a makeshift row, row three and a half.

All a bit of a shambles really! I wouldn't have minded only this dad who caused the mayhem is a strapping chap over six foot tall who really shouldn't have had any trouble keeping up with a load of ten year olds! I'm only five foot two and I was marching in four inch heels (don't ask!), but I managed to keep up better than he did!

The next bit of the proceedings, playing sitting down, should have been a doddle by comparison, but by the time we'd waited for the little kids to dance around the Maypole (OK, so it's July, but they were cute!), the looming clouds had started pelting down huge droplets of rain.

'It's only rain,' insisted our conductor, despite our pleas to be allowed to go inside. 'Just get on and play.' So we sat there performing our tunes in the middle of a thunder and lightning storm, getting absolutely drenched, with a few hardy parents standing watching us, huddled under umbrellas.

By the time we finished our four tunes, our sheet music was so wet you could have used it for papier mache and the cardboard folders that we usually keep the music in had all but disintegrated. In fact, I'll be very surprised if any of the music ever survives long enough to make it back to the music centre library.

When I got home, I thought I'd check how my Triond pieces were doing, and to my amazement I discovered that one of my articles is on the Most Popular Articles list in one of the Writerhood categories - Style.

That was a big boost. Hopefully it will get my name known a bit better on the site and attract more readers to my pieces.

I've also dashed off a haiku poem this evening and submitted that, so I'll have to wait and see how that does.

So there we are! Thrills, spills, drips, and a bit of a lift, all in one day. I hope you enjoyed your day. Have a good weekend!