There never was a truer saying than ‘tempus fugit’ – time really does fly, and in one direction only – forward. It’s hard to believe that Oriana Choir has been rehearsing the repertoire for An Oriana Songbook for nearly three months. It feels more like three weeks! But that’s probably an indication of what an enjoyable experience this rehearsal season has been. A programme of varied, interesting, appealing, and unanimously beautiful songs; a musical director whose love and

*Performance Back in the pioneering days of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it was so exciting for a fourteen-year-old boy (me!) to listen to the lead-up to an imminent launch from Cape Canaveral. The jargon they used was fascinating – “Roger, Mercury 3”; “Copy that, Control”; “T minus 20 and Counting”; and, most exciting of all, “We are Go for Launch”. Then the countdown, and “We have lift-off” (never “Blast-off – that was strictly science fiction m