Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Sisyphus Does Selfridges

An early start today; Rob is on leave today and tomorrow so I went in early to cover for him (and make it look like I was actually spending some time in work this week!) Nothing much happened.

Around 11am I headed off to Selfridges to join the boys singing for their customers. I wasn’t on the schedule to sing today but I know that sometimes people don’t turn up for these things when they say will, so it’s good to have people on standby. In the end I sang in each of the five slots. We were well supplied with Baritones, but had only one First Tenor for most of the day – a new guy, Richard Q, who held his own very well. The gigs generally went well; although we are crammed onto the tiny balcony halfway up the atrium again, it’s a good spot as you are seen by everyone on the escalators and the sound percolates through more of the store. Being mic’d also means you don’t really have to strain your voice. It’s hard to maintain focus over so many repetitive sessions though; there were a number of times when I was on automatic pilot and confused tune or lyrics with some different section of the song.

I was pretty much exhausted by the end of the day, so I’m going to really have to conserve my energies tomorrow when we go straight from the last performance onto a rehearsal of the full show; that will be a long day!

After the show Brett went to the gym and Feroze and I headed down to Green Park – him, to get his watched fixed at Cartier (!), and me to nip into Fortnum and Mason’s to pick up a few boxes of their Chocolate Liqueurs, which have become a Christmas tradition in our family of late.

Realising that I’d left my laptop at work necessitated a side-trip to the office before I could go home and put my feet up. Once home though, that’s exactly what I did and boy!, did it feel good!

Early night for me tonight and then up bright and early tomorrow to do it all again!

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