Friday's storms left us a little unnerved

because after cleaning the church and putting it back together (chairs, lectern, communion table, etc) ready for tomorrow I left Pat and the kids there for the teenage group and came home for a brief session of reading before heading off to the music school, then the park at the town centre.

The town band was founded 150 years ago and so there was a marathon celebration concert in the park - three stages and groups of all sorts singing and playing. We were on at 18:40, so we met at 17h15 at the music school and loaded the drumkit, foul yellow wooden music stands, baritone sax, piano, amps etc into the various cars. To be honest our car alone takes half the stuff. I frightened the folk by telling them that we were thinking of changing for a Mini... Then off to the park.

All went well and there was no rain. Enough cloud cover to stop us baking.Pat joined us in time for the concert. Each group that played got a bottle of red wine and each person got a commemorative cotton shopping bag and a ticket for a meal and a drink. Jolly nice ! So we went off and got our food and drink. Neither of us fancied chips so we both had a merguez sandwich. There was a deposit of a euro to put on a cup for a drink. To begin with we thought we didn't have a euro but in the end I found enough small change so we could have a drink one after the other ! Then some folks gave us their meal tickets, so this time we had chipolata and chips. The next people we thanked graciously but refused the tickets...

I asked the director of the music school how he felt it had gone and he was extremely happy. The only little problem was the balance of the trumpets and the trombones / saxos. Apparently this was largely to do with the placement of the microphones. You need to put them low down to catch the trombones and saxes, but they were too high up so the trumpets dominated.

We took the drumkit, etc. back to the music school and slunk off home, tired but happy.

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