It is a great honour and delight to have the opportunity to write the tour blog this evening. So far, the page has been formidable, so I hope I am up to the challenge.
This morning was idle. This was partly down to the late night everyone had yesterday. The so-called “Mixer”, indeed mixed elements of entertainment and boredom. For some (the less confident, I assume), this school dance only lasted 5 minutes, even with Rubin Patel and Henry Seabright dressing up “to take the piss”. Rubin’s attire consisted of a buttoned top button and the same glasses which Ed Picton-Turbervill sported on the Martha Stewart show, the shocking evidence of which can be found online. Whilst several members of the choir left the mixer early, I was greeted by an extraordinarily elated John Gowers with an energetic “Yeah!” when he arrived back at 11pm. Apparently, he was seen unashamedly demonstrating his dancing, an activity that influenced Daniel Parr as well, who was also spotted bopping earnestly. The night was a blow for poor James Picton-Turbervill, who was desperately relying on his resemblance to Teen Singing Sensation Justin Bieber in order to interest the girls, sadly to no avail.
Yesterday was also our first evening spending the night in boys’ rooms. For some, this meant squeezing a thin mattress between two full sized beds, whilst for others, due to their boys hosts neglect, this meant sleeping within centimeters of another choir member. Egor Grigorev and Henry Seabright, I apologise if my breath smells; I’m afraid there’s no more space in our room for me to sleep. A small Jack Eastwood was up until 1am last night, made more pitiful by his height, of course. His host only arrived back from Lacrosse (the most popular sport here) at 11pm, and, after explaining he had an English essay to write, proceeded to start to write it several times, but being continually distracted by his girlfriend on Skype. Having caught up on sleep, however, we had Brunch at 10.30 this morning, which, after consistent mornings of 7am wake ups, was a complete joy.
During our quick choir rehearsal, we were told to “Americanise” our encore, Under the Sea, in order to make the entire experience of performing it to an American audience all the less embarrassing. Nice logic Ralph. After this, the choir formed its sporadic scratch football team, the Angels, in order to play Woodberry Forest’ first XI. Charlie Marshall created some football chants, my favourite being Hark the Herald Angels Win. These were also shouted out by Hugh Cross, who, this morning, had complained that he was finding it difficult to sing. The match was a success by any standards. Whilst technically we won (on account of the policy “Next goal wins”), we graciously accepted the score 4-3 to the opposition. We contracted very few injuries, only one foul to George Wilders prompting our on-call nurse, Laura Highy, to rush to his rescue. Even more dramatic was a graze to Alex Eager’s knee. A more elaborate description will follow soon.
The rest of the afternoon consisted of further idle wanderings around Woodberry Forest. Rubin Patel, when asked what they thought of the school’s tuck shop, said he thought it was “nice and greasy”. Ed PT then chastised him, warning him he couldn’t speak about their national cuisine that way. Rubin then asked what the USA’s national cuisine was, to which Ed replied, “Fat”. No prejudice, of course.
Our concert this evening lay within the school’s compulsory chapel service on a Sunday evening. We were very nervous that the boys would be anxious to get away as soon as possible. However, the reception was brilliant and even prompted one student, (telling us later), to consider shouting “Sing some Britney” during the final applause. An evening pizza party concluded this, our last day at Woodberry Forest School.
I am grateful to be delivering the swill – I hope it has gone down well.
Quintin Beer
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