In the spirit of Arnie, the Terminator, or General MacArthur, we vowed to return, but our inexperience in timing the duration of a global pandemic made it difficult to predict when that would be.
Weeks crawled by and despite frequent prods from MD Peter and inspirational links to You Tube videos from President Wayne, instruments languished in their cases. At long last the call came. Limited half band rehearsals, under strict Covid guidelines, could start again. No hugging, lots of hand sanitising and furniture cleaning, no tea break…..what a changed world we had inherited. Finally – Oh Joy – the whole band could play together and, fingers tightly crossed (not easy when you’re playing a brass instrument) we could start planning performances.
And so the great day arrived. Our first Covid era concert. Would anyone come? We were well prepared with Covid Marshall (thanks Cathy), buckets of sanitiser, sign-in sheets, spaced-out seating – and to our amazement they came in droves. In fact at one point we were worried that the permitted capacity would be exceeded and people would have to be turned away. Fortunately, opening up the veranda solved that problem. Let’s hope the warmth of the music compensated for the rather frigid seating.
What a buzz to be able to play to an appreciative audience again. And, thanks to Brenton’s technical wizardry, the whole concert can be seen again on the CCB YouTube channel.
Congratulations to our gifted soloists, Julie Dorey, David Collinson, Adam Little and Steve Packer, who don’t seem to have been in the slightest affected by the extended lock-down. Thanks, as ever to compere Sue for all her research and fluent pronunciation of all those Eurovision titles. Thanks Mayor Jill for your constant support and encouragement.
Above all, though, thanks to our ever faithful audience. You can’t begin to imagine how much your enthusiastic reaction to our music meant to us. We hope to see you again for our annual fund raising concert War of the Celts on Sunday October 11th at 2.30-4.30pm.
