Making Enchoiries

Let me stick a hand in the air, first of all, and say today was for Disappearing shit. Went home to the flat for a bit this morning, and decided, quite deliberately, to have chips from the Fountain Fish Bar for lunch. The way you can tell it was deliberate is that I came home and told everyone, rather than hiding it and disposing of the evidence.

Still I say, this week will turn out to be better than last week. It's just that this week hasn't really started yet.

This evening, I got a kick in the arse from Fate.

Since we started planning to come home to Wales, I'd had the idea of doing a thing.
What I didn't want to do was the obvious thing - which in my case would be to join the local am dram society. Quite apart from anything else, it's now run by a guy I used to know as a teenager, and whose life I schemed to...well, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck right over more than once. And while I have a couple of friends who are in the am dram society, I've sort of done that when I was a kid. Going back to that seems not to be something that appeals to me. What I did think about though is something terribly, terribly grown-up. I thought about joining a choir.

In fact, I thought about joining a very specific choir. The Dowlais Male Voice Choir.
The Dowlais Male Voice Choir is famous. I mean....world famous. Has been for decades - it's even mentioned in Dylan Thomas's acme of Welshness, Under Milk Wood.

A guy called Chris popped in tonight to commiserate with Ma and console with her on Dad's death. He'd known Dad from the Masons. As he made to leave, he mentioned he was going to choir practice, with the Dowlais choir. A handful of questions later and I was in his car. I listened to the choir practice, and knew I'd like to be among this band of brothers. I'm going again Sunday. They're putting me into Top Tenors to start with. This will be too high, I guarantee you. But it won't matter. I can't wait to be a part of that wall of adjustable sound.

How grown-up is that?!