Sunday October 30th

A musical Sunday. First Choral Matins in The Hague, a service I love but which we now have only three or four times a year. At last we sang the full Te Deum again. The Jubilate was replaced by a Jubilate out of the sixteenth Century anthem book. So in fact we sang two anthems which was great. Of course, celebrating All Saints Day, we also sang the hymn "For all the Saints,..". A few new voices have joined the choir, probably just for Christmas, but they are professional musicians, so we, and especially the men, benefit from that. It was an enjoyable service.

Unfortunately I could not be sociable at all after the service, as I had just time to hurry home and make a sandwich and some coffee, before rushing off to Haarlem for Choral Evensong. It was strange to sit in the congregation instead of joining the choir, whose singers I know so well. There were just three sopranos and three altos, but eight male voices. One of the sopranos had just landed at Schiphol at 6 o'clock this morning, after a two week holiday in Australia. She seemed quite normal and sang as she always does. I bet I wouldn't have been able to keep my eyes open, let alone sing the correct notes.

This was what the choir sang:

Introit:        S. Nicholson, God be in my Head

Prec. Resp.:  Tomkins

Canticles:    Orlando Gibbons

Anthem:      J. Amner, O God, my King

It is a pity that the congregation was very small, and mainly consisted of elderly people – myself included, I must add! -  Is this a dying church? I hope not.

 A recording of the Nunc Dimittis from the short evening service by Orlando Gibbons.

The mist had thickened and changed into a soft drizzle when I drove back home. I had planned to go to another service this evening in the village church of Wassenaar where one of J.S.Bach's cantatas would be sung, but skipping another meal to do that did not really attract me. Also, it was dark and wet by that time. Today we changed from summer time to winter time, which was very nice this morning but makes the evenings dark and the afternoons very short.

Just watched a documentary on TV, an amazing one by David Attenborough, about the Frozen World, the Arctic and Antarctica. It is an absolutely wonderful film, even if I had only seen the ice crystals they showed, greatly enlarged, all different, all perfect jewels, some extremely delicate. It was said each ice crystal differs from any other ice crystal, each and everyone is unique. They are never the same, but always symmetrical, one of the mysteries and beauties of nature. It is one of the episodes of the series The Living Planet, the BBC documentary. If you have missed it, it is worth trying to find the DVD's. On You Tube you find several episodes of the Frozen World.