Last night, a little bit of magic happened.

I’m planning to take my community choir back to face to face singing in September but am also planning to run a hybrid zoom session. I get quite nervous about technology and things not working, so I tested the kit out at the venue a couple of weeks ago. But it still didn’t satisfy my control-freak need to have everything tried and tested, so last night, I got 20 singers to meet me at the venue and we broadcast a ‘gig’ singing along to our own lockdown mixes to around 35 people on zoom.

Firstly, it worked. So that was a big tick for me. Phew.

But oh HOW LOVELY was it to hear REAL VOICES!!???

The chance to see people and to see them with each other and to see how they interacted together and sang together and chatted together just reminded me of why we have this community choir and why it works so amazingly well.

“I’d forgotten how much I need choir in my life” said Becky (who NEVER misses a rehearsal…. and I mean never..)

“I so needed that tonight” said Lynsey.

“So wonderful to see everyone and sing together again!” said Wendy.

The community has managed to thrive during lockdown – we maintained around 100 singers online and have at least another 50 waiting to re-join us. This is loyalty at it’s very best and I’m so grateful for the support over the lockdowns. At the start I didn’t think we’d have a choir to come back to but with a lot of hard work and commitment from everyone, we most certainly have! We even managed a little bit of a social afterwards to give us time to catch up together…. and there may have been little bit of disco dancing…

I’ve got three weeks of now until we return in September, initially as 2 choirs before I merge them back into one in January. And I can’t wait.