Singing your own stuff

I'm just back from choir practice and realised I've not taken a single photograph all day. It's been so dreich, and for once I've been so occupied with non-visual activities - swimming rather than walking, for example, that I didn't even think of it. And now it's after 10pm and my head is full of music.

And it's also echoing with words that I wrote, probably over 10 years ago now. It's another month till Advent begins, but choirs with services to prepare for have to start early, and tonight we put up Advent Song, originally written by Mr PB for a quartet and today revised by him for a group of 10 women and one man (him). And I sing the familiar words again, and the music that I have come to love as being inseparable from the words, and realise that though they are a part of me, buried in my heart, I have only sung them on perhaps four occasions. 

Tonight I felt I had to share with the singers the idea I'd had when I wrote the words - the picture of someone in our part of the world, on the penumbra of Europe, in the dark, with a tiny fire the only light, waiting for the miracle of the returning light - and the miracle of the Christ-child's birth. And explaining that, and singing it, brings it all back - that hair rising on the back of the neck that inspired it in the first place.

So, decent photo or no, tonight is one of these nights I feel very, very fortunate.