Always carry your rubber chicken...

As a musician you need to be flexible. Well, the best laid plans of mice and men etc etc.

I'm on the Channel Islands with Hatstand Opera doing a workshop and concert tour. It's a fairly hefty schedule, four different islands, four workshops and four concerts (8 shows) in four and a half days. At least, that was the theory. Until THE FOG happened. Apparently it's a fairly unusual occurance, but we have a combination of sea fog and moderately high winds, and the islands have had all flights cancelled for more than two days now. We were on Alderney when it happened - Island Three in the series. But I digress.

This is our third trip out here (it's actually my sixth, and the first one was 25 years ago). This year we started in Guernsey, then boat to Sark, boat back to Guernsey and small aircraft (8-seater) to Alderney, then theoretically plane back to Guernsey and bigger plane to Jersey. With me so far? Well, for some reason we got to Alderney but our luggage stayed in Guernsey. Fortunately we had time to remove the music bag, and Fred, the rubber chicken, but we had very little else. Fred features in one of our songs and we felt we had to have him with us. But because of weight restrictions and a mess-up on the booking front, the aircraft wasn't big enough to take us, the other passengers and the Hatstand luggage. So we arrived on Alderney minus our concert gear (DJ's, dresses, overdresses, props).

The workshop went well, with most of the school turning out for it (age range approximately 8-15). As the voice wizard I introduce the kids to healthy voice exercises, including sirening (pitch gliding up and down). One young boy actually went off the piano - more than 3,500 cycles per second. This time I also did a fair amount on the adolescent voice, with some of the information from our Developing Voice course (last weekend). It certainly felt relevant as a number of the back row had beards!

The evening concert was fascinating. When you have no costumes and no props, the audience really gets to discover whether you can do the job. Fortunately we had our Hatstand workshop shirts (and a change of underwear), but that was all we had. Except the soprano. Ah, sopranos. She had managed to pack two pairs of jeans, her makeup bag and a pair of high heels. I suppose we shouldn't have been surprised.

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