Starry

Brendan is here this week, doing some more work upstairs - the last of the really messy work, I hope. He's hacked and scraped huge quantities of low-grade cement and crumbling mud from between the stones of the upper living-room walls, and is now pointing them. It's a horrible job in the current temperature, especially as the cement mixer (for the chaux, not for cement) is out in the garage. Yesterday was cloudy and cold; last night was clear and extremely cold; today we haven't yet achieved zero Celsius, and the sun is brightly reflected from the white lawn.

We went to dinner at the house of my singing comrade: a small, select and merry group, with much interesting conversation ranging from books to rugby to linguistics to films, the occasional foray into current affairs and a satisfying rant against advertising. There was a guess-the-grape quiz, which even I enjoyed because it entailed discussion of farming practices and descriptions of the valleys and villages from which the wine came. I was happy with Y's home-made elderflower cordial (note to self: must make some next year).

M informed us, after collecting B from Jonzac station, that according to his car's thermometer display it was getting warmer. When we set off home at sometime after midnight, the grass was diamonded, but as he started the car, he remarked that the temperature had gone up... then: "Oh, that's a minus sign!" It was actually -6 degrees.

Very cold, but so clear. The sky was stunning, so bright with stars that it was hard to pick out constellations. Sadly, much too cold to take out the telescope!

Sheets and partitions

Vocabulary is curious and fascinating: local usage, specialist words, and the "false friends" of words which came from the same ancestors but haven't been on speaking terms since that row between many-great-grandfather and his brother. I can read Voltaire, Dumas, and Mallarmé pretty well; the reading list at university included many mid-twentieth-century works and a dictionary of Argot. Two days spent in a French school on an exchange visit left me with some grasp of the difference between poetry and verse and an ineradicable ear-worm of the first four lines of La Cigale.

Colloquial speech is sometimes easy, and sometimes not so easy (I remember the English wine-dealer and old-house-owner who said his conversational French wasn't very good but he spoke excellent Building). For example, trying to establish what animal was hit by Y's car had me lost after she and C decided it wasn't cerf, sanglier, or lapin - I didn't recognise the names of any of the others.

I've been meaning to check some musical terms, particularly the term for "sheet music" aka "the dots". Note that English doesn't have a word for it: the fact that we commonly refer to it as "music" can be very confusing when trying to define "Music", a hard enough task anyway. It turns out that the French use one word rather than a phrase, and I now know what it is.

At Monday's rehearsal, the director commented that I was ranging my partitions.

Montchaude and no meteors

Téléthon continues. The Arc en Ciel did another fund-raising concert last night, in a small town called Montchaude, which is near Barbezieux and quite a way from here.

We provided the whole concert this time, which was quite a sing for a smallish a capella group - a capella aside from accordion accompaniment in Moscow Nights (Russian version) and tenor recorder playing the violin intro to Mozart's Laudate Dominum. And TWO standing ovations! The director said "no more" after the second encore, as we'd sung for over two hours with only a 10-minute break. Most people went off to the post-gig party at the Mairie, but my fellow travellers weren't interested. I didn't mind, being quite tired myself.

It was still almost completely clear, and, as on the way there, I sat in the back of C's car trying to watch for Geminids, but no meteors were visible. It was too cold to stay outside looking for them. The weather changed three days ago from cloudy and occasionally very wet, to clear. The first day was sunny and warm, but since then it's been very cold, much colder than usual for December here. There is even a suggestion of snow in the weather forecast! The plants must be in shock, especially those in flower. I went to bed with two hotwater bottles; they are still warm so I don't feel like getting up yet.

Téléthon concert at Saint-Léger

Y, C, and I arrived before 8pm, the time requested (I like to get to places in time to grab a nearby parking-space). The concert didn't actually start until after 9, which was a long time in a church where the heaters had only just been switched on. It warmed up nicely, though, and there was much chat amongst the choir while we waited. I'm not in favour of talking before singing, but it was all very friendly and took our minds off our cold toes.

The programme was Arc en Ciel, Le Rallye de Saint-Antoine, cake and hot drinks; repeat apart from the cake and hot drinks. Most of the female singers had to decline the drinks because the church has no loos. Not a problem for the blokes, of course, though a few of them helpfully suggested forming a circle for us out in the graveyard.

We sang well and bouncily: carols and songs in French, Russian, English, Hebrew, Spanish, Zulu, and three comic songs in French.

The Rallye... was a surprise.
It looked like this, except the St-Antoine rallye's coats are green. Somebody behind me joked "how rude" when they turned their backs on us and put on their hats. I don't know why they turn their backs because the trompes are loud enough to be heard whichever way they're facing. Very loud. Those of us in the front row (i.e. members of the choir) had to put our fingers in our ears. It's an exciting noise, and beautiful when they played softly; decidedly raucous when loud. The "trompe" is obviously difficult to play, and it's amazing how many notes they can get.

I hope someone has taken a photo of the rallye wandering around with the instruments, because they didn't carry the trompe - they wore it: most of them, round the neck. I wanted to comment to my neighbours but realised that French uses the same verb for "carry" and "wear", so it needed too much explanation. They have special cases for the trompes. Well, all musical instruments have special cases, but these were unexpectedly special. The case with a hole!

The pieces are short (they need a lot of breath) and most of them consist of short phrases in a call-and-respond pattern; a few pieces are more lyrical. Apparently the trompes de chasse bands started around here about 20 years ago (or re-started, I'm not sure). I'd like to get more information: next year I'll visit the St-Antoine riding school (about 5 miles from here) and ask.

As the announcer said at the end of their last set, the wild boars in the forest around St-Léger would have been very nervous that night.

Got home at half-past-morning.