Sunday, the 9th of November, 2014

Tis the beginning of November. Out with the autumn and in with the winter. This years autumn has been particularly colourful this year, with all the trees in my neighbourhood reflecting the red and white bricked buildings. Now the end of the autumn has come, and so all the trees are bare perhaps bar the remaining surviving leaves, clinging on the trees by a limb. However,  all the leaves lie freshly on the ground; walking to church on Sundays is particularly enjoyable, scuffing the brown, reds, yellows and golds in my shoes as they carpet the pavement. This sadly will only last a few more weeks, when the leaves rot away, leaving no colour on the trees or the city pavements - but that's where the Christmas lights come in. Over the past week, the city council has been putting up the Christmas lights in the city, adorning the streets with sparkling and bright rows of lights. Over ten thousand bulbs come out every year, and yet each time - it feels as if the city has been reborn.

Another busy week and and another busy schedule, for the third week in a row for the show that I am directing, my pianist and assistant have not turned up. This makes proceedings very difficult; my job is to take the performers beyond the notes and into the music, but seeing as I am limited to the job of playing the notes for them on the piano, means I cannot clearly bring them in and bring them off when they are needed to be so. Although I am more qualified to do the repetiteur job, my job now is Musical Direction, not playing the piano for the singers' references. Despite this, for the first time in a long while, I have had the time to actually sit down and put pen to paper in the form of music. However this is not my own composition, this in actual fact is my job of arranging the shows' orchestral parts to a much smaller ensemble, reducing the size of a normally 30+ players strong orchestra to a group of about 15. This is no mean feat, as there are at the very least 36 hours hours worth of parts to input into the computer in the first place; and then many painstaking hours to come as I re-write and re-organise the music from about 40 individual parts to about 11. In any case, as they say - the show must go on!

What is really quite frightening is the fact that Christmas is fast approaching. Firstly, there is the palaver of buying Christmas presents and cards, and then secondly the slog that is the Christmas haul - every church service conceivable essentially occurs on the few days that is the Christmas festival. This year again promises to be a busy year, with churches in my home village all demanding my services. As a fool or opportunist, I don't know - I accepted. Let the hard work and preparation begin!