no knitted string mail

Thinking of being an englisc warrior? Check out the rules on the Hastings re-enactment site:

No celts or furry jackets

Weapon Spec

Embrace the dark side- but take someone with you who knows where to find it!

Scene: 30 otherwise sane adults shuffling round a field at night somewhere in deepest Essex, bending double to peer under leaves and into bushes....about half of them are also waving around small black boxes which regularly emit loud squarking noises. Is it a secret Essex midsummer ritual? Are they hoping to summon aliens? Are they just simply lunatics? No! It's the annual EWT glow-worm survey -combined with a quick bit of bat spotting courtesy of a nice lady from the Essex Bat Group. She arrived with a whole box of bat detectors and entertained us with a bat quiz while we waited for it to get dark enough to see the glow-worms.
The bat detectors bring a whole new dimension to the dark...there is such a lot going on up there, though it was rather alarming to be told that the detectors can also detect nylon! What is nylon emitting for?? And why are people trying to detect it?? Anyway amongst other interesting facts we learnt that some bat species are defined solely by frequency. So whizzing about in the air above the field were 45mhz- pipistrelles and 55mhz pipistrelles (presumably they don't mate because they don't like each other's accents) though there is also a 52.5 mkz pipistrelle which makes one wonder if mixed mhz marriages are taking place.
Oh and the glow-worms? We found 5 in the end- tiny green bright lightbulbs shining out from the undergrowth and not wormy at all, small nondescript female beetles clinging to stems. They just light up and wait apparently, and hope for love to drop out of the sky. They are getting rarer and one theory is that the poor males can't see them amongst all the other lights around. One imagines poor desperate glowworms mating with fairy lights on porches or something.
Actually I realised this trip was in fine old family tradition of night-time expeditions. Remember Hainault golf course? (comets and meteor showers?) and Harlow park in the dark for the comet (again); the middle of a field on holiday once to see the Milky Way? Epping Forest for roding Woodcock (twice), Northward Hill for Nightingales, Lee Valley for a planetary line up (and nightingales - extra bonus!), Lyme Regis for New Year storms.......Norway for the Aurora Borealis....?

Singing at The Coliseum

This weekend was the culmination of the 2006 Baylis project at the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera. Valentines Singers were amongst about a dozen choirs from all over the country taking part. It was a bit like a grown up version of the Borough music festival, we all rehearsed in our home choirs, then got together last weekend to rehearse as a full choir. Yesterday we spent all morning on the technical rehearsal which was basically about how to manouvre 12 choirs/ 500 people all around the crowded backstage coridoors of the Coliseum without mishap! I loved the Coliseum itself, amazingly ornate and intimate, rather like a Victorian aunt's front room on a huge scale and I found going round the back through twisting coridoors and back stage spaces fascinating. Eg why are there 20 giant Christmas Trees in mid summer (pretending to be a forest in 'King Arthur' apparently!)

In the first half each choir got about 7 minutes on stage to do their own thing, We sang 'Sweet and low' (soothing setting of Tennyson-rather risky on a hot Sunday afternoon!) and my current favourite 'Fa Una Canzona' (wonderful/impossible 16th century Italian Madrigal)

Waldorf Singers- Fa Una Canzona

(We sing it better- plus doing 2 more verses...)

Being on stage singing was more nerve wracking than I expected, especially as I ended up front row centre stage about 2 feet from our fierce conductor!

In the second half all 500 of us got together to sing a specially commissioned piece called genesis, all very modern tone poem type stuff which I loathed at first and then came to really love. We start off singing about 'nothing', then a wierd section which is all about 'ripples' then a wonderful jolly chant in 8 parts about 'join the bones together' then all of a sudden all the chords come together for 'earth embrace us, heavens embrace us'. It hadn't really made sense in earlier rehearsals but the first time we did it all through as a massed choir we got to that bit the sound was so overwhelming I just started crying.

How does music speak to our hearts so strongly? How can it make us feel without words?