We are 60 Degrees North

            January 2012

Wow! We had a great time with the Christmas show! Well we had a couple of extra rehearsals on Sundays in Carnegie Hall, it was freezing cold mind! I was strangely relaxed funnily enough considering children couldn’t attend because of parties, sickness, school shows, more parties, family get togethers. It was kind of hard trying to tell youngsters to pretend their dance partner was there and get formations right! On the morning of the Tech I was at my elderly gents and saw that I had a missing call from the lady who was going to be doing the narration for our Nativity piece. I rang her and knew immediately from the sound of her voice that all was not well! She had a chronic chest infection and couldn’t do it! She did however organise a stand in who was as it turned out a magnificent choice as she was fantastic!

We moved on to the Dress Tech on the Tuesday night at The Garrison. Last minute fixings of scenery, costumes and props took place. Seeing how the on screen projections looked and the underwater film for the last dance piece. Singing Saturdays did all their pieces in one and vanished into the night while we got on rehearsing. In the midst of this all the sicky bug struck! Children chucking up literally in the wings, the Stage Manager spent most of the rehearsal running around with antibacterial spray and piles of paper mopping up! It was the old maxim really…if the rehearsal goes terribly then it will be all right  on the  night! And thankfully it was!

We had sold out tickets for the show about two weeks before hand and people were advertising on the community website asking if anyone had spares to sell! We could have sold out two nights at least! I basically just put the headsets on, made the opening announcement, completely forgot to announce that we had a replacement Narrator! And off we went. Actually the whole show ran very smoothly, I spent so much time organising everyone for their entrances and making sure the lighting was right and curtains were opening and closing at the right time that I really didn’t see very much of the show at all! Our committee Chair lady went on right at the end to give a brief note of thanks and asked the audience if they had enjoyed themselves. Judging by the rapturous applause they had! The reviewer of the show came backstage afterwards with a very happy smile on his face so it was clear he had liked it….and he knew a thing or two about putting on a show! 

Afterwards the clean up, strangely and thankfully enough I didn’t have a lot of left clothes in the dressing room! Something to do with having helping mums in the dressing room. Despite the obvious points for disasters they didn’t even occur thankfully! No more projectile vomiting either!! We lost a couple of children on the night sadly to that but there will plenty more chances for them to perform again next year! I was really pleased with all the pupils. They did very very well considering that most of them had never danced on a stage at all certainly not doing what  we did that night! The show was filmed and I’ve seen some brilliant photos that audience members took and to top it off we got a splendid review which was really generous and positive!

So Christmas Day soon arrived along with the worst forecast for the most horrendous weather to hit the Shetlands for many many years. I had to drive down at ten in the morning to her indoors for breakfast and it was windy then. It then proceeded to get worse and worse! I walked into the wife’s kitchen to see her neighbour’s roof tiles just peeling off one by one! Quite scary really but none hit us! It was my night to have the kids and about four o’clock we decided to leave to drive back to Bigton. I opened the outer door to go out to take overnight bags to the car and suddenly realised ‘shit this is really quite bad!’ I got blown over half way to the car, managing to hold on to the bags, and crawled to my car on all fours to throw the bags into the boot then crawl back to the house trying to keep my balance. I then had to get the kids out to the car and fortunately there was a bit of lull in the wind gusts. To be honest I feared seeing Low C being blown over but we made it to the car safely. Driving home wasn’t much fun either with the car being buffeted all over the road, shouldn’t really have been on the road but eventually we made it home in time to get in, lock up, close curtains and settle down to watch the Christmas Dr Who only for, having been in the house for five minutes, the power to go off!! Well fortunately after a few minutes it came on again though kept flickering. The sound of the wind was horrendous but eventually later in the evening it calmed down a bit. The next day Shetland woke up to the damage, roofs blown off, salmon cages blown out to sea and all. The highest winds were measured at speeds of over 100 mph in the North. Thankfully because Shetlanders are used to this kind of weather, flying debris is very much non existent. 

Different story on the mainland as of today as writing this another horrendous storm hit the UK with even higher winds and this time terrible damage and people being killed by falling trees and high waves. Scotland mainland got hit badly as well with wind speeds of 102 in Edinburgh. Roofs blown off, chimneys falling through roofs and bins being blown down the road at high speed. Thankfully it was a Bank Holiday so there were not a lot of folk on the roads!

New Year’s Eve was a quiet one. I went to my neighbours as they had a few folk  around and stayed there until about eleven, then I went home to watch Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. I actually ended up in bed just after midnight! 

Resolutions for 2012? I never make them to be honest! Just get back into work and get on with life. Live one day at the time and make the most of each day and be happy!

Well this is a short one folks. I hope you all had a happy New Year and wish you a prosperous and happy 2012 and lets hope it is going to be a damm sight better than the last one!!!