Dear all,
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year – not only whatever partying you might have planned for Saturday night, but also our trip to Westminster Abbey on Monday!
There is lots of information below… please try and read it, in particular anything that I’ve put in bold!
For those of you travelling on the coach, we will be leaving from outside St Stephen’s at 9.30am so please arrive early enough to collect your robes from church and load them onto the coach. There is now a 2 hour restriction to parking on Hales Drive Monday – Friday but I’m assuming that excludes Bank Holidays – I’m waiting for someone from the council to get back to me to confirm this.
We should get to Westminster Abbey at about 11am, giving us time to unload robes and music, and hopefully have a look around the Abbey before the first rehearsal at 12 midday. If you’re a choir member meeting us in London, please be at the Abbey in plenty of time to begin rehearsing at midday; we’re rehearsing somewhere called ‘Cheyneygates’ – I have no idea where that is, but I’m sure someone will point you in the right direction if you ask.
We’ll break for lunch at about 1.30, then reconvene at 3pm for final rehearsals before we have time in the Abbey to go through processions and rehearse with the organist (who is one of the Abbey organists).
For those of you who are not singing and coming as ‘groupies’, once we get to London, the rest of the day is yours, but we hope that you’d like to join us for Evensong at 5pm. They have reserved 15 seats for us for Evensong, which might be enough, but please could you let me know if you want a reserved seat for Evensong, or if you have family coming to Evensong who would like a reserved seat. Choir, your seats are already reserved, so you don’t need to worry!
The coach will be leaving fairly soon after Evensong, so please don’t go wondering off! We should be back in Canterbury by 8pm at the latest.
Choir members, I need to know whether you have your own St Stephen’s robe with your name on it, or whether you have been wearing somebody else’s. If you don’t have your own, do you have one from elsewhere that you could bring with you? Please let me know BY RETURN if you DO NOT have a robe. If you leave it until Monday to tell me, I may be a little irritated and unlikely to be able to find anything for you to wear! Please also remember appropriate plain black footwear – no heels that would be noisy on a stone floor please! (I’m thinking of ladies more than gentlemen, but you never know…!)
If there is anything else that you want to know, please don’t hesitate to contact me, or speak to me either at Choir Practice which is happening this Friday at 7.30pm as normal or at Sunday morning’s service, which will be a Sung Eucharist for Epiphany (there is NO Evensong at St Stephen’s this Sunday).
See you all on Monday, if not before!
