There and Back Again

It’s hard to believe it’s Wednesday already. Work has been mundane mostly; a bit of bother about email monitoring, all kinds of minutiae about the Boston acquisition, that kind of thing.

Monday evening was the first Chorus rehearsal after Christmas. We were also doing an induction for new tenors, so I was on data-processing duty and taking their pictures. Because we were only after tenors though, the group was smaller than usual and didn’t take long to process. The rest of the rehearsal was starting the new season’s repertoire which is, so far, all old repertoire. We worked on Bushes & Briars and Keep It Gay, both of which I found I remembered entirely after just a couple of goes through the score. It had to be the easiest first-rehearsal-back ever!

Tuesday evening we were booked to see Avenue Q with Mikey, Ruth & Chris. (It had originally been Rosie & Matt instead of Ruth & Chris, but Rosie is steering clear of Matt (turns out he’s a married man) and didn’t want to come on her own.) After some faffing over who and where we were for dinner, Brett & I eventually met up with Ruth & Chris at Wahaca on Chandos Place and had some reasonable Mexican street food washed down with a fair amount of tequila.

The show was as enjoyable as ever. Daniel Boys was generally good as Princeton/Rod; he managed to slip in a few gay mannerisms for Rod but Brett didn’t think he did the voice too well. I rather liked Christmas Eve this time. I think she must have just taken over the part last time and was still trying to reproduce her predecessor’s performance. This time she was much more believable doing it her own way. There was also a new Gary who I liked too.

Afterwards though Mikey wasn’t feeling well and (literally) hobbled straight to the Tube to go home. Brett and Ruth both fancied a drink and Brett dragged us into Halfway to Heaven, which Ruth loved (as the only fag-hag in the room!) We only stayed for one though as both Chris and I had early starts in the morning.

I managed to set my alarm incorrectly, so was up late and had to compress my morning routine into a twenty-minute rush to make sure I got the train that would get me to Kings Cross in time. In the end I needn’t have bothered as the Leeds train was twenty minutes late. The journey was uneventful though and en route I finally began roughing out my strategy paper. I was mostly there to have a bit of a blue-sky talk about technology with our recent graduate intake, looking for their views on how we should take advantage of the latest tech trends. I’d had one with the London grads yesterday and it was interesting how they compared. Leeds still has a small-company feel; they turn to each other for answers before going elsewhere whereas in London they liked online self-help rather than having to ask someone a question. Apart from that the day was spent doing my usual job at a different desk and wandering around the office, networking with our Leeds staff whom I only rarely get to see face-to-face.

The train home was on time. I’m now dined, blogged and am just relaxing for the last half hour to Kings Cross. Should be back in Catford in an hour or so.