Category: life and such

Unexpected Cambridge

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I’ve been living in Cambridge for just on a year now. Here are some things I’ve discovered:

1. The wind. People do tell you about the wind, to be fair; it’s just that one can’t comprehend the sheer sideways chilling force of it until one’s been there. ‘Cambridge winds are lazy,’ says my friend Helen. ‘They can’t be bothered going around you. They just go through you.’ I understand that this has been a relatively mild winter; nonetheless, I got caught out last week and had to wait half an hour on the platform at Cambridge station without gloves. Following liberal daily applications of hand cream, my skin is just about returning to normal.

2. You start caring about the Boat Race. This was not a good year to start caring about the Boat Race. Thank goodness for University Challenge, that’s all I can say.

3. You forget all about hills. Hills? What are they again?

4. You get very good at dodging bicycles, tourists with selfie sticks, and people trying to sell you punt trips.

5. You begin to believe that every conceivable object can be transported on a bicycle. Not just the obvious things like kegs of beer or small children. I myself have brought home on the back or the front of my bike a) an orchid in a pot; b) a daylight lamp; c) a herb planter. And I know someone who used to carry a folding bike on his cargo bike, so that he could meet his partner at the station and they could cycle back together. Now that’s love.

Expanding the Comfort Zone

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of expanding one’s comfort zone from within, as opposed to stepping out of it (useful posts here from Havi Brooks and Jem Bloomfield), in the context of singing – purely because I spend a lot of my spare time doing it.

I estimated a couple of months ago that I’ve averaged two hours of choral singing a week over the past decade. There have, of course, been lighter patches (2007, of which I spent a third in Spain and Germany not singing much at all, and my second and third years at university, when I decided that the need of the serving team was greater than the need of the chapel choir), but they are balanced out by the five years I spent in the choir at Holy Trinity, Guildford. During term time we did two services every Sunday, with a half hour or forty-five minute rehearsal before each one, and an hour’s practice every Thursday. As a result I know a lot of the standard church music repertoire inside out and back to front: if we assume that each piece was sung twice a year, once during a morning service and once at an evensong, then I’ve performed most of them ten times.

I was not at all confident when I joined. All my life I’ve been close to people who have more singing experience than I do and, while they have been nothing but supportive, I’ve always been able to see that their sightreading was better than mine, that they were more confident than I was, that they could hold a line against all comers and I couldn’t. Fortunately, when I joined Holy Trinity, there were plenty of other altos to follow.

I’ve joined two new choirs over the past year, and I’m still singing less than I was at Holy Trinity. They have both proved the expansion of my comfort zone, in very different ways.

The first one was one of the several choirs that run out of my parish church. The workload is considerably less: we sing one, maybe two, services every month, with an hour’s rehearsal beforehand, and a rehearsal on the preceding Friday. This is very much flying by the seat of the pants: a lot of sightreading, and no guarantee that there’ll be anyone else on your part to prop you up.

And that doesn’t scare me any more. Once upon a time I would have been too terrified even to consider joining this choir, but my comfort zone has expanded to encompass this method too.

Granted, some of this is stuff I already know from Holy Trinity. On Easter Sunday I was the only alto at evensong. That was fine: we did Blessed be the God and Father, which I have sung every Easter since 2008. On the other hand, I was the only alto at the previous evensong, and I was sightreading an anthem… I can’t remember what it was, only that I’d never seen it before in my life, and that the alto line contained several top Gs. The very first piece that I did with the new choir was Herbert Howells’ Requiem; that, thank goodness, had rather more rehearsal time dedicated to it.

The other choir is pretty much the complete opposite. In this choir, ten weeks to learn three pieces is presented as a frighteningly tight timescale. This is the workplace choir, set up by the social club and the excellent Workplace Choir Company. Its basic assumption is that nobody has sung anything since they were at school, when they were probably told by a teacher that they couldn’t. This seemed to be about right at my workplace. There was a question early on: who was in a choir already? I was one of perhaps three people who raised their hands. Three out of sixty, and the only one in the first altos.

There was the solo. (But I’ve done solos before, in front of people who would know exactly where I’d gone wrong.) There was the fact that I was doing the solo with a microphone. (That was new territory.) There was the responsibility. At one point the Director of the Executive Office told me, ‘You’re our leader’. I’m not even sure that she was joking. (I have never before in my life been the most experienced member of a large choir.) There was the assuring of everybody that everything was going to be fine.

And somehow I was able to meet it all with a general attitude of ‘Bring it on!’ Solo? Bring it on! Microphone? Bring it on! Teaching a tricky snippet to the rest of my section without reference to a piano? Bring it on! It’s being filmed? Wait, what? Er, bring it on! Thank you, comfort zone, expanding yourself while I wasn’t even looking.

I managed to appear calm through the performance, although it wasn’t until last week, when the high-quality video was made available, that I was able to see whether or not I’d cocked it up. I never know how a solo has gone after the event. I’d like to think that’s because I’m so absorbed in the music that I’ve no space left in my head to remember it, but it’s happened before when I’ve lost a bar in the middle of it.

Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Here’s the result. I’m the tallest soloist, in the green shirt, singing the alto part in the second verse. Me and my expanded comfort zone.

Getting Around

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I’ve been doing a lot of walking these last few days. This is partly because my bike has been in for a service (now reclaimed, complete with a new front mech shifter that actually works!), and partly because I’m planning to walk St James’ Way from Reading to Winchester in July, and I need to get some practice in.

I’ve walked from home to the station; I’ve walked from the station to home. I’ve walked as far round Regent’s Park as I could get in my lunch hour. I’ve walked from town to the station after I’d dropped my bike off, and from home to town to pick it up again.

I’ve been walking. I’ve been cycling. I spent twenty-five agonising minutes on a bus that was progressing down Station Road five metres at a time. I would almost swear that I could feel my blood pressure rising the longer I sat there. Stepping onto that bus, I’d relinquished control and surrendered to the rush hour. Cars are meant to give you control, but of course they don’t. There were plenty of cars stuck in that queue along with me.

I wanted my bike back. That was the reason I’d got on that bus in the first place: I had twenty minutes to get to the repair shop before it closed. I knew that I couldn’t make it on foot. I thought there was just a chance on the bus…

No. Twenty-five minutes of jerking, teeth-grinding, stop-starting creepy-crawling down Station Road and Hills Road. I ran from the bus station, but I didn’t have a hope of making it before the shop shut, and I knew it.

On the bright side, I had an excellent excuse to buy an ice cream and walk home, and it was a glorious evening in which to walk alongside the Cam, over Jesus Green and Midsummer Common, with the college rowing teams hauling themselves down the river and the trees very green with their new leaves.

I love walking. I love the freedom, the chance to turn aside and look properly at things that catch my eye, to go another way entirely. I love the gentle ache in my legs, reminding me that I’ve been out and seen things. I’m less keen on the blister; that’s from wearing the wrong shoes.

I’m so glad I don’t have to sit in that queue every day. I’m so glad I don’t drive. I’m so glad I don’t need to drive. I’m grateful that I’m well enough to walk long distances. I’m thankful for my own pig-headedness and determination that allowed me to relearn how to cycle in my late twenties. I’m glad that I’ve lived in towns and cities with good public transport links.

(And I do like a bus ride. But not in rush hour. Never again in rush hour. Not when I’ve got somewhere to be.)

Miracle Due

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I used to be terribly cynical about Romeo and Juliet, and adaptations thereof. “But you only met yesterday!” I’d cry. “What did you expect to happen?” I would wonder whether anybody really thought that the state of affairs in Verona would be materially improved. I would side-eye people who held up R. and J. as Most Romantic Couple, etc.

It occurred to me, yesterday, watching West Side Story, that I’d missed the point. Of course people are always falling in love in a wildly inappropriate fashion. Of course it rarely ends well. However, in a well-regulated society, not ending well does not involve people getting killed. Romeo and Juliet (or Tony and Maria, or whoever) are young and hopelessly over-optimistic, yes, but if they weren’t also in the middle of a war zone it would be a farce, not a tragedy.

There were two points to this post:

1. I seem to be getting less cynical as I get older;
2. I had forgotten about this song:

I used to see the irony in it. Now I hear the hope. It’s an interesting contrast to the equivalent speech in Romeo and Juliet, in which Romeo also knows there’s something coming, but is as gloomy as all get-out about it. I prefer Tony’s take on it, going out to meet it head-on, in joyful expectation. I’m not convinced he isn’t right, either. What’s coming to him doesn’t work in the world in which he lives, but it doesn’t stop it being good.

It resonates, too, with the wild feeling of possibility and hope that I associate with Advent. It is probably significant that I was reading back through godblog‘s Destuckification Novena yesterday, before we went out to the theatre, and that I’m feeling increasingly that it is time and more to move on… I don’t know what’s coming. Nor could I stop it, if I did. All I can do is go out and meet it. It’s an attitude I’ve been trying to practice for a year or so, now, and it works so much better for me than hiding and observing.

Come on, something, come on in, don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair…

Balance

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I have resolved that when I move to Cambridge, as I will at some point as yet undetermined, I shall make my bicycle my primary mode of transportation, rather than my tricycle. I love my trike, but it is impossible to get on a train, and occasionally a pain to lock up, and if I can’t ride a bike in Cambridge, the English Amsterdam, I’ll never do it.

To this end, and also because I felt like it, I took my bike to the park when I got back from Farnborough this morning. I got CTony to raise the saddle to something approaching the correct height, walked the bike down to the park, and spent a happy half-hour riding around in circles.

It’s been very interesting, re-learning how to ride a bike as an adult. It is still new enough that I marvel every time that first kick of the pedals sends me forwards, gracefully, not sideways, violently. That’s what it is, ‘learning to ride a bike’, finding that split second of trust and courage that gets you moving fast enough to take both feet off the floor and find you don’t need to put them down again.

I have been thinking today, though, about signalling. Signalling was what stopped me riding a bike ‘properly’. You know: on the road, to get to places. A cyclist who can’t signal is a menace, and I just couldn’t do it. I could manage to get my left hand off the handlebar, but if I tried to lift my right hand, I just went straight over sideways.

I always thought that this was because I am strongly right-handed, and am generally clumsy and unbalanced. All this is true: I am forever walking into things and dropping stuff. It turns out, however, not to be the reason that I can’t signal.

Because I can signal. If a year on the trike has done one thing for me, it has persuaded my brain that I will not fall off if I take a hand off the handlebars. Because whoever fell off a trike? (Me, as it happens, but only once, and it was a stupid bit of path that I should have got off for, really.) On the trike, it is second nature to steer with one hand, and use the other to grab the water bottle, or scratch my nose, or feel my pocket for the umpteenth time to make sure my keys are really in there – or to signal.

On the bike instead of the trike, I forget that if I signal I will fall off. And so I don’t fall off. Silly, but true, and very difficult to teach. It isn’t about balance at all; it’s about confidence, just like being able to ride the damn thing in the first place.