Monday

We were all supposed to be at Guildhall by 9am in order to pack up the vans and get on the road, but the tubes were delayed and then the vans didn't show up for forever because they were told that they didn't even need to leave the dispatch area until 9:30. So we hung around the front of the school for a while talking about how it was so amazing that we were all actually awake and there.

When the vans arrived and we started loading I realized that the bass was going to be in the same van as the amplifiers and other heavy unyielding things so Clare Catchpole and I went on a hunt for a bass case. The flight case made me feel much more comfortable about the transport aspect of the trip, but also proved to be a pain in the neck because it was, after all, seven feet tall and over 100lbs. So everything was loaded, we got everyone divided up in to which vehicle they were meant to be in and then Caroline and Jo learned how to drive large, limited visibility vans through central London. Everyone else fell asleep.

The drive to Aldeburgh (ald-brr-uh) took about 3 hours, the highlight of which was when the song that we learned during induction week came on the radio. None of us had realized that it was a commercial song. When it started Nick and I turned to each other and talked about how it sounded exactly like...(wow this story would work better if I actually remembered what the song was called) then the words started and we all sang along in harmony and texted the people in the other van so that they could hear it too. It was pretty great.

When we got to the Britten-Pears school we unloaded everything and ate lunch at a local cafe and then got down to business- namely circle games and warming up. Sigrun led some quite complicated rhythms and then divided us into three groups and had us pass the rhythms around the circle. So we were each doing one complicated rhythm, watching the complicated rhythm next to us that then screwed up our current rhythm and waiting for Sig to say "switch" so that we could subtly change the next rhythm because we never quite got it while the group to our left was playing it.

These are body rhythms by the way, which means that we were all smacking ourselves repeatedly and most of us ended up with red spots on our chests and sore thighs.

What else did we do on Monday? I think that was the day we learned "Simba" which is a song from somewhere in Africa with three parts that layer (and maybe I should take better notes.) And also learned the material that Paul had written for the first school workshop on Tuesday. I'm getting better at learning things by ear- it helps that a lot of what we have been playing and singing has been riff based so that the segment that I have to hear and then play is not as long as it could be and is usually diatonic (in the key).

We were meant to have fish and chips that night when we got to Orlando House (our house had a name, it is "Orlando") but the shop was closed so the first dinner team (Tara, Heather, and myself) made Mushroom risotto and a big salad and it was lovely.

Eventually we went to sleep. Monday was a long time ago, that is as much as I remember.