Journeys

we often think and talk about a process we may be going through as a journey, I might be said to be on several journeys at the moment, as I move towards being truly single again (not my choice); move on with my transition (my choice), and work at getting my drinking down to a more socially and medically acceptable level. But over the weekend I will be undertaking a couple of very real journeys.

I may have bored my regular readers with this already, but on Sunday I will be playing with the Croydon Symphonic Band at the finals of the National Concert Band Festival not only will we have the journeys to and from Manchester to contend with, but one of the pieces we will be playing is Paul Hart's Journey and Celebration (at this point I wanted to put in a link or embed a Youtube recording or something, but there just isn't one ~ yet.   If you really want to hear just what a great piece this is you can download a recording here. The other piece we will be playing in our 20 minute performance is Philip Sparke's Invictus



These are both technically challenging pieces for most of the band, indeed I count lucky myself that sitting at the very bottom of the band I have ended up with a part that is not too taxing, but still more than enough to keep me interested.

As I am sure you will understand the band has had quite a journey to get to this point, although we have picked up quite few high awards over the last fifteen or so years it doesn't seem that long ago that we felt lucky just to get a certificate for turning up!   This year we had to play at the regional Festival back in Early December last year.   Since then we have started a new term, have a few different players, some left, some joined, and have had to work up a couple of new pieces to festival standard (as well as playing a full concert!).

I am really looking forward to tomorrow, spending some time travelling with good friends, tomorrow evening when at least a few of us will probably be sampling some local brews.   Then I'm looking forward to Sunday morning when we play, I'm also looking forward to it all being over, hopefully adding some Celebrations to our journey, then the end of the journey, coming home and relaxing.

But then of course that will just be the start of another journey, and meanwhile all the others will be going on as well.