This is a day for choirs, and I promise to bring you my favourite choir of the season just a bit later.
But first, the Complaints Choirs. These performances have been around on the web since the spring, I know, but they come back to me every once in a while as endlessly charming and encouraging. The singers are just folks, speaking their minds or, rather, singing them. Some of their lines are political, but some are just cranky-funny. Work makes them crazy; they have personal problems; their local governments are limp, and the wider world is going off in directions they don't like ... It's not fair!
It's amazing to me to see the joy on all those faces as they toss big and little problems we can all identify with together into their choral protests. Of course life isn't fair. We're all supposed to know that. Who ever told you, yadda yadda yadda ... But doesn't it feel good sometimes to shake your little fist against the sky? Or any target of your choosing?
The Complaints Choir of Birmingham
Do join in with the Complaints Choirs in comments here if you feel so moved -- within reason, of course. The main rule is that your complaint must always end with the universal protest: "It's not fair!"
And now, to the classics.
For many years, whatever else Christmas was tugging us away to, my Thorfinn and I would make space in the day to find the broadcast of the boys' choir of King's College, Cambridge. The service never changes, although the faces of the wee boys do, year by year, as their voices change as well.
The service always begins with the boys gathered at the back of the congregation. One young man (still a soprano, but better trained than the wee-est of the wee'uns) begins to sing "Once in Royal David's City" a capella. After one stanza, the rest of the choir join in, and the boys proceed up the aisle to the choir stalls. By the end, the great organ and the congregation have joined in.
It stirs me every year. Here is the processional from 2004.
To all our friends greeting this morning in the many different ways that we do, peace and love if you have found those, or the joy of having a good nark at the universe if that works better for you.
Me, I'm off to clean a few cat boxes. Again! It's not fair!
Happy merry to the good ship pogge, the best blog in Canada, no matter what the voters said. It's not fair!
Modesty forbids me to agree with you, of course, fern hill. And that's not fair!
Mathilda pulled my phone line out of the wall. I can still talk on the phone, sort of, but we're getting a lot of noise on the line, and to get that fixed I will have to call Bell and suffer through their hour-long admissions menu. It's not fair!
Or maybe Mathilda is actually an undercover CSIS agent providing them with an opportunity to bug your phone and that's why you have all the strange noises. It's not fair.
humph, CSIS never bugs MY phone... It's not fair!
Paperwork is a nightmare
The money doesn't matter
It's doing the accounting
That makes me mad as a hatter ...
It's not fair.
I'm still reeling from the Y2K fiasco. And NOW we're into the late bit of the first decade of the 21st C. It's not fair! And I haven't slept with a rock star since 1984! It's not fair.