The concert

On Friday night I joined a crowd of fellow choristers in going to a concert by another local church choir. Our own concert will be the last Friday in October so this was a good chance to get some context for that. Particularly, as my friend Tony Badjie [leaning over his chair in the photo] observed, "everyone will come to ours just to see what you do".

I met my friend Matthias [see photo of us in the dark] before the concert, giving me the chance to visit his family (also in the choir)and eat a mango (again eliciting the "wow, you like Gambian food" reaction which is becoming familiar). We then set put to meet Tony, Katy and Joe. As I was clearly a bit confused as to what was happening, Tony have me the Patrons Money, essentially a donation from our choir to theirs, and which meant I didn't have to buy a ticket.

The choir were lined up outside as we entered the church hall and settled down. The came in singing in procession. Their programme covered spiritual and cultural music and they dressed in African dress, changing at the interval into traditional Gambian clothes and beads. Weirdly for me the hall was very noisy and the choir was constantly battling a lot of noise from supporters around the bar, as well as people dancing up to the front to add extra donations in the songs dedicated to their group. Of course, when "St Therese Choir" was called we danced up and threw extra cash in the pot, accompanied by the grumblings of our President Alfred that it's "St. Therese SENIOR Choir".

After the performance, the hall was reset for a dance, grill and beer party. But by that time sleep was closing in and Alfred's offer of a lift home was too good to refuse. And so I went home with thoughts of how much practice I'm going to have to do to get through October's concert, both singing and dancing.