I’m back from the land of sheep, lots of churches and massive afternoon teas! I was in the country for a music festival, where I played Bach on the flute and sang on Sunday morning. They put us up in a hotel, which I had mixed feeling about. It’s fantastic if one happens to get lucky and can say “Like to come back to my hotel?” before shagging in private. Otherwise it’s a bit dull, if as in my case, it’s the only three nights of the year when I don’t pick up a gorgeous babe. Or not.

I thought I was getting a three-hour lift down there on Friday with Paul, a choir colleague, in an otherwise empty car. This was a slightly daunting prospect, so I put a few CDs in to play. When the car turned up it turned out there were three more people than expected. As I prepared to squeeze in the back seat, a lovely girl said “Hi, I’m Janey. I thought I’d introduce myself before we spend three hours squashed together.” And fair enough too. Janey is a music theatre chick so we had lots to talk about. That evening I saw their concert (they’re all in another choir), which was excellent, and hung out with them afterwards. Oh, did I mention Alex (yes, the one I kissed) is in this choir? So we had a chance to converse properly since that event, which was good. As I had no singing to do the next day, and no need to be up before midday, I was up for a big night. Alas the choirs these days aren’t the choirs of old, so the “big night” was six beers with another old-style chorister, Harry (the gay one). We had a great time, with him telling me about the joys and difficulties of teaching singing to school students. If you’re a bass, how do you teach a soprano? When I got back to the hotel I ended up watching a strangely compelling Japanese movie about how if you’re a middle aged movie-maker you should watch out for women who were tortured as children, because she’ll chop off your fingers, hands, your tongue if you’re unlucky, and keep you in a cloth bag while making you promise to love only her.

This reminds me of New Scientist this week, in which I found out what we don’t really need to survive. This includes:

• anything below the waist (amputation below the waist is called hemicorporectomy)
• arms
• eyes
• ears, external and internal
• one kidney
• spleen
• pancreas
• most of the liver
• gallbladder
• one and a half lungs
• larynx
• teeth and hair

This would require insulin, pancreatic enzymes, other diet suppliments and antibiotics. Then the the statement that Obviously, quality of life begins to become an issue at this point, as it did for the amputated guy living in a bag.

I’ll spare you a detailed account of the rest of my weekend, so I’ll say the concert was great (I only got lost one and a half times), I sang my really high note just fine even though it was at 10:01am, I hung out with gay guys and attached girls, and didn’t have the inclination to try and pick up locals, which in retrospect is probably a very good thing.

Big Brother is back on, so if you’re one of the many people I know who doesn’t get it, you can be warned by this distinctive background to skip the paragraph. Of course it won’t really get interesting until they forget about the cameras in a few weeks and start saying what they really think. For the record, I’ll say at this early stage I like Aphrodite, who on TV looked and seemed nothing like the pictures on her link. I’ll have to put it down to my Pisces-radar. I can pick ’em... Happily, this is the first time that live streaming is available for the tiny minority of us that are mac users. If anything is going to push my 6 gig per month limit, this will be it :)

Here’s an interesting entry I’ve been reading by .

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