Christmas spirit

Well. That was a crazy day.

After breakfast R and I went to Waitrose to buy Christmas drinks and a few other bits and pieces, then sat in the café for a while over a leisurely coffee and croissant, doing our socials on our phones. Back home and shopping unloaded, we both did some quick chores before heading out again, this time in different directions. R went to Evesham for a walk, while I (after much internal debate) decided on the owl field. It was a sunny, still, and quite warm day down in the Vale, and though the Met Office had changed its mind several times during the morning about the weather up on the Cotswold scarp, it had finally settled on it being sunny there too, and I'd settled on believing it. The owl field would of course be a total zoo on a sunny Saturday, I thought, but I felt it would be copeable.

It was a total zoo, though not in the way I'd expected, and it was definitely not copeable. Firstly, when I reached the top of the plateau I found myself heading into a wind the car seemed to struggle to progress against, and on the wind swirled a fine spray of mizzle from the lowering rainclouds. And worse, when I reached the owl field the first thing I saw was a hunter cantering across it, and the second the fact that the lane was essentially blocked by the vehicles of hunt supporters (who are far less polite about their parking than photographers, let me tell you). With a bit of judicious off-roading I managed to force my way through, passing just one other person on the lane who looked like an owler. He and I gave each other a Special Look as I drove past.

The local bird life was in uproar, though how much of this was down to the hunt and how much to the stormy conditions, I can't really judge. There were four Red Kites up over the field, plus numerous corvids and swirling flocks of winter thrushes, and I briefly saw a set of broad, pale wings over the quarry land to the north of the field, from which the main body of the hunt emerged a few minutes later. By the time I found a pull-in and got self and camera out of the car the (putative) owl had disappeared, but I've added a shot of one of the red kites as today's second image.

If the weather had been better I would have waited to see what happened in the aftermath of the hunt, but in the circumstances there didn't seem much point. I was incandescent, and set off home literally raging. Twenty minutes into my journey, the phone rang. "Where are you?" said R, sounding unusually breathless. "Half way down Dover's Hill," I replied cautiously. "Why?" "Because the Compton Verney Christmas concert starts in less than an hour," he panted, "and it seems as though we both forgot all about it." Given that we use a shared iCalendar, into which this concert was entered about four months ago on the day I booked the tickets, it was a remarkable feat of joint incompetence for us to have overlooked the fact that we had an appointment this afternoon, and but for R's phone deciding to point out to him that if he was going to get from central Evesham over to Stratford and out to Compton Verney by 3pm he was going to need to get a wiggle on, we would most definitely have missed it. 

As it was, when I stopped at the next field gateway to check that I had the e-tickets on my phone, and then double-mapped Compton Verney on phone and satnav, I discovered that the route from Chipping Campden was straightforward, and (unlike R) I had plenty of time to get there. I was sitting in the chapel, looking like someone who'd just got up from an uncomfortable night spent sleeping in a hedge, but otherwise relatively composed, when R hurled himself through the door after running all the way up the hill from the car park, and dropped into the seat next to me. Two minutes after that the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir trooped in, and as soon as they began to sing all the upsets of the day were washed away by the music.

I posted a shot of the Compton Verney chapel back in 2019, when we first attended this annual concert, and raved about how beautifully the choir sang under the baton of Paul Spicer. In December 2020 the concert didn't happen because of Covid restrictions, but we went again in 2021 and enjoyed it just as much. Last year we couldn't go because they scheduled it on the same day as the Chipping Campden Christmas concert, and today we discovered that in the interim, as well as the expected student churn, there has been a personnel change at the top: the Chamber Choir is now directed by the extremely busy Julian Wilkins, who's a personable man and an excellent communicator. If anything this year's choir was even better than the two previous ones we've heard, though I think (especially given the slightly eye-watering cost of the tickets) that they've changed the balance of the programme a little too much: for me there were too many famous-carols-with-audience-participation today, and not enough of the fabulously intricate pieces we've heard from them before. That said though, they performed some Palestrina and William Byrd that were breathtaking, and their rendition of Rachmaninov's Bogoroditsye Dyevo reduced me to tears.

The camel, by the way, was having less than its most enjoyable ever afternoon at the entrance to the main house, where it was being contained in a small enclosure with its keeper, and induced every now and then to pose with people who wanted their photos taken. It seemed to me to be contemplating the phone call it intended making to its agent at the first available opportunity.