Blink and the Weekend's Over!

Friday ended on a sad note; the compulsory redundancies were announced at work and one of the secretaries who has been with the company forever was on the list. She seems fairly resigned to going but I expect it is a blow to her even if she was expecting it. She has always been close to the IT Team as she is great friends with Henri, who had brought in champagne and cakes to celebrate her birthday. It was a bittersweet toast we raised that evening.

The Centre Stage Christmas Party that evening was pleasant; it was held in the massive room above The Adelaide pub in Chalk Farm – a pub which looks way too upmarket for the area. There was a bar and lots of overstuffed sofas along with the chairs and tables littered with glowing nightlights. I chilled a bit and unwound from the emotions of work while Brett mingled. Things livened up around 9pm when the (somewhat overloud) karaoke kicked off. Most people had a turn and Brett even put us both down to do the old Chorus favourite, Seasons of Love. We didn’t stay too late though as we had a full-day rehearsal to look forward to tomorrow.

Saturday, we were up at 7:30 to get up to Downhills Primary where we rehearse on weekends. The rehearsal-proper didn’t start until 11am but the Baritones had scheduled an extra note-bashing & choreography session starting at 10. It was quite a useful session though, so I didn’t mind the earlier start.

The main rehearsal was a long day, but was likewise valuable. We have two more full runs of the show (Monday & Wednesday) before we perform to a paying audience and I am confident we will be in good shape by Friday. Lunched with Brett & Mikey at the local greasy spoon and was amazed to find out that Mikey has only been out to his family and most of his friends since he joined the Chorus in September. He’s such an outspoken, confident guy I hadn’t imagined he had ever really been in the closet!

After the rehearsal we headed down to Wimbledon. We’d been due to join Rod & Jess for a carol concert at the Wimbledon Stables but in the end we were too late for that. We got to meet Caspar (Jess’ horse) though and he’s a fine animal. Afterwards we headed into the The Dog & Fox for a bite to eat. We hadn’t been in there since it’s been refurbished and it was a very pleasant surprise; a classy and sharply decorated bar and restaurant. We had some really lovely food at reasonable prices and an evening of catching up. Amongst everything else, they told us about a 1920’s immaculate Deco flat on Wimbledon Hill which they’d viewed about six months ago when it was priced around £400k. Apparently the agent called them this week to see if they’d be interested in it at £310k. I was gutted: A spacious, period flat in excellent condition in Wimbledon is probably the closest thing to my dream home that I’ll ever find in London and with a bit of a stretch we could probably have afforded it! Other than that their main news was their own house move to Wimbledon next month.

Today has been mostly about domestic chores, but I did finally get down to processing the photoshoot I did with Graeme N a few weeks back. It was a bit of a struggle as I was coming down with a rather bad cold that day and eventually had to call it a day when the lemsip wore off. I managed to get a reasonable number of usable shots though and I’ll send them off to him tonight.