Skip to main content

Sights and Sounds of London

As advertised in a previous post, The London Gay Men's Chorus' Christmas season is now in full swing.

We had our first too short gigs in a bar in Islington on Sunday in support of the Terrence Higgins Trust. That went ok, if you don't take into account the noisy environment, the lack of a director and the boosing between the two sets.

Yesterday, we started the three day schlep at Selfridges in Oxford Street. This is the third year running that we are doing it (and I am taking part) and it is always good fun. The first set was as usual crap. It's more like a technical rehearsal than a proper performance. We need to get used to the location and figure out how we sound. Good job the Monday morning at 12 are not that busy.

After four sets and a whole afternoon of almost uninterupted singing, I would have loved to go home and... die. Not so, however. We all trudged our way to lovely Camden for a dress rehearsal of wednesday's big concert at the Barbican. Another three hours of singing... With choreography for certain numbers.

That was the "sound" part of the day. It is a perk of the gigs at Selfridges to be able to enjoy a few interesting sights (if you get my drift).

As I was getting home around eleven in the cold and windy night, I suddenly noticed on the other pavement a woman flailing her arms and shouting. It being dark, I wasn't quite sure at first, but I soon realised that appart from a handbag she was stark vulva(?) naked. Of east asian origin, short with thin, normal looking legs but a fat upper body. Her flesh spilling over her tiny hips. Not exactly a pretty sight!

As often after singing (and I had done a lot of that yesterday), I was so wound up that also I was quite tired I did not manage to go to sleep until very late.

I am about to go get my bus to another round at Selfridges to purge my eyes and mental photo album of last night's sight and produce more (hopefully nice) sounds.



Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.

For the Living Left Behind - Frieda Hughes

No one dead who loved you  Would wish your future years dismembered  Against the rocks of their departure.  They would not sentence you to the guilt of betrayal  For any moment they weren’t uppermost in your mind  Nor would they wish you whittled down like a stick  To pick the stony teeth in the open mouth of abject misery,  Daily, until you are nothing left.  No one dead who loved you  Would want your still-breathing carcass  To be lost in the wilderness  That spans the two worlds of the living and the dead,  Where you are neither dead nor living.  They would not applaud your misery,  But would weep to watch their loss  Made pointless by the waste of you.  The dead become a part of us; our skin, our bones, our thinking;  Their existence is continuous in us  And the best we do in everything  As we move on from the moment of their passing.  Step back from the graveside where nothing flower...