Multitasking

William is a brilliant choir director whom we all loved working with. But Florence can play the accompaniment, conduct, and sing at least one of the parts in a powerful alto voice all at the same time. William would only do one of these at a time, and usually abandoned tricky bits of the accompaniment. “Is this because Florence is a woman?” speculated T.

A bunch of other things have changed too. T and I were a bit late, and everyone was already doing a walking meditation when we arrived. This was followed by Florence’s swirly whooping vocal exercises, and then a game where we sang an arpeggio in unison, each chose one of three notes to end it on, and then walked around listening to find other people singing the same note. William would be shocked!

The music is less challenging than usual — Fauré’s Requiem, of which we performed nearly half last year, and some small César Franck pieces. So there’s lots of time to work on technique and little details, and it all feels less stressful. Usually by this stage we’d still be struggling with some bits.

Good news on the water front too. Luckily our friend V is a plumber among his many other skills. So he called round on Friday and I explained the problem to him. He inspected the installation, as usual making many denigratory comments about the person who’d installed it, and then said, “Well, I can see that by just stopping up that bit of pipe there, you can have hot and cold water everywhere except to the kitchen sink and the dishwasher. How does that suit you?” Delighted! He went off to have lunch and find some appropriate bits while I went to Lézignan to run a bunch of errands and try to find some wifi.

This took longer than I expected. There are no cafes in Lézignan with wifi. What do you think this is, the 21st century? I went to the Mediatheque to ask, since the tourist office was closed in defiance of its advertised opening hours. “We have free wifi,” they said. “No password needed.” Maybe so, but it was hopelessly slow and kept dropping out. I gave up in the end, and after finding a phone signal and talking to S about plumbing I headed home; finding that the cafe in Fabrezan was now open, I stopped for an excellent cup of coffee, a chat, and a blip.

At home I got the fire going and settled in assuming I wouldn’t see V until tomorrow. But at about 8 pm the doorbell rang and there was V, only slightly the worse for drink. “You weren’t in earlier, but I’ll do it now.” He hopped onto a rickety table in the storeroom and with the aid of two spanners had the job done in two minutes. Marvellous! Still no internet, but you can’t have everything.