Once again, following on from our busy Christmas we had a quiet start to the year. We also found that our new rehearsal room was not what we wanted and, thanks to Walter Jones, we moved to Holy Cross Church, West Cross, for a few weeks. On occasions, when we learn new items, we like to split the choir into tenors and basses and use different rooms for rehearsing. Unfortunately, this could not be done at Holy Cross and we have now moved to the Linden Christian Centre, which is just down the road. This appears to be a great facility for us, and will hopefully become our base.

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Mal Herbert who sang with the choir for over 30 years.  He had been Part Steward for the bass section and he taught new bass members a tremendous amount.  He was a committee member from the very early days and became Secretary of the choir, a position that he held for many years. He will be greatly missed.  His wife Pat worked hard for the ladies committee, and and we send her our deepest sympathy.

We welcome Billy McCarley to our 2nd tenors. He had his voice test and did very well, and we hope he will have a long stay with us. We have also had a few other probationers with us and, hopefully, we will be adding to our numbers in the next few months.

Our quiet spell has given us the opportunity to learn some new items. We have been working hard on a wonderful arrangement of ‘How Great Thou Art’ which has put us slightly out of our ‘comfort zone’. It has been arranged by Jim Clancy, from the American chorus, Vocal Majority, and is completely unaccompanied and has an amazing climax.