A CHOIR PRACTICE AND A WANING GIBBOUS PHASE

I stood outside the church and howled at the moon.

I know that sounds a bit weird, but that is exactly what happened. Well, actually, it was more of a 'Nooooo!' and it was more to do with my text messages than the silvery disk hanging between the clouds.

Don't you just hate it when you get invited to the thing you really want to go to, after you've booked a thing you also want to go to on the same night, but not quite as much? For a moment I raced through ways in which I could decline my first invitation. There were none. Could I lie and say I was ill? Absolutely not! Could I just not turn up? No.

Annoyingly, my conscience was showering me with lightning bolts of truth and shattering each despicable excuse as I thought of it. No, I realised after a few moments that the right thing to do is to honour my first commitment.

This was how choir ended for me tonight then: howling at the moon.

It hadn't been a bad evening. We had a couple of new people who really enjoyed it and the Christmas tunes didn't sound terrible... after a bit of practice.

"Listen!" I heard myself saying in that teacher-like middle ground between determined and grumpy, "You've got to hear the note in your head." I stabbed a D on the piano. "Hear it, sing it silently, then sing it out!"

I'm not the best choir leader or music teacher. I barely know what I'm doing most of the time, but I know when six people are singing six slightly different notes that they think are all a perfect D.

I also know it's very difficult to remain patient until they get it. It's always been astonishing to me that some people just don't know that a note is out of tune. I don't have perfect pitch, but to me, a flat note is as distracting and as incongruous as Mickey Mouse ears painted onto the Mona Lisa. Imagine staring at that hallowed painting with somebody who couldn't actually see a giant pair of Disney ears stuck carelessly, absurdly and horrendously onto Lisa Geradhini's head.

I'm ranting a bit. I can already see Future Me getting a bit restless at my immature lack of patience and good humour. Choir is full of nice people - I love all of them and we got somewhere nice today. It's just that it can be hard hard work, and despite people's best efforts to point out otherwise, I'm not exactly Calcot's answer to Gareth Malone.

For a start, I bet he never howls at the moon.