Signing off for the Holidays

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Usually my last blog post in December is full of talk about how choral folk will be looking forward to a rest after the busiest time of year for performances. Not so much this year, eh? But we all deserve a bit of a break nonetheless. There’s been an awful lot of screen time this year, and our eyes deserve a rest. So, other than Skyping with your family, maybe now’s a good time to spend less time online and think about curling up with a good book or a craft project instead.

There’s little one can say about 2020 that won’t sound obvious. It’s been strange, it’s been tough, we’ve all grown in ways we couldn’t have imagined this time last year. Some of the changes we have had to embrace we may choose to carry onwards with us into the future, others we will gladly abandon as soon as we possibly can.

There’s hope around the corner in next year, but also a good deal more uphill work before we can get back to anything we might regard as normal. So it’s important to rest and recharge while we can. It won’t be a ‘normal’ Christmas, but it’s still a chance to step off the treadmill of routine and mark the turn of the year.

(I briefly considered using the metaphor of the days starting to get longer and lighter as a metaphor here for our moment in the pandemic. Then I noticed what a northern-hemisphere-centric metaphor that is. Then I reflected how much better some southern hemisphere countries have been managing covid than many in the north and thought the metaphor was perhaps apposite after all. Then I remembered places like Taiwan and Brazil and realised that such generalisations rely on forgetting the exceptions that contradict simple patterns. Normally I don’t share this kind of overthinking with you, but it’s the reason that the simplest sentences sometimes take the longest to write.)

Anyway, wishing you all a quiet, safe holiday season. May we reconvene in the New Year feeling refreshed and ready to return to making music.

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