vflick

The carol service on Sunday felt terribly chaotic, but there's a reasonable chance no one in the congregation noticed, which is sort of a win. One of the instruments playing was horrifically out-of-tune, to the point where I was struggling to stay in the same key as the organ because it was so distracting; everyone except the organist inexplicably stopped at the end of verse one of a choir-only item and then had to hurriedly scramble back in as she kept going, but she said we were sufficiently in unison that it almost sounded intentional; and there was one choir item with a three-part split where the first soprano completely failed to provide the descant that was supposed to be there, but since the rest of us ploughed on with the melody and the lower harmony probably no one else could tell. I was very glad that that one wasn't my fault... at least directly.

(Indirectly, I had been singing the top line previously, and was moved onto the melody at a rehearsal where the first sop was absent, so I suspect that what happened was that she was expecting me to come in and panicked when I did something else entirely. But. The congregation didn't know it was supposed to be there, so.)

I got roped into helping out with the last graduation ceremony, at which I can't really complain because it was only my second of the season. The VC said nice things to me (twice!) about my scroll-handing job, which suggests to me very strongly that he must have overheard me talking to some of the other people before the ceremony about the time he had to move me because I was accidentally blocking the line of sight for the official graduation photographer taking pictures of the handshakes, my personal most-mortifying graduation moment of the last ten years. But embarrassing though that realisation also is, that's actually really nice of him to care enough about the fact that I felt bad to deliberately say something positive! The old VC would never.

(There was also a bit in his most recent all-staff email which, when boiled down out of the delicate phrasing, amounted to "literally all my colleagues thought it was hysterical watching me, a non-hugger, get hugged by lots of excited graduands". I do so enjoy having a VC who does a good impression of being human instead of an Auton! Even when I disagree with him he mostly sounds like an actual human being!)

This week is mostly choir, but I am at least working from home which is going to be amazing.