h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Our conductor got married yesterday. I do hope she'll have a happy life. The chap she has married seems a bit odd to me, but they have decided to stick together. They met in a chatroom.

She looked really lovely, and she is an absolute darling person with rather unfortunate looks and figure, but yesterday she made a lovely bride and we were all so happy (good job I distributed a couple of dozen boxes of Kleenex around the choir seats for us.)

She celebrated a full Mass and had chosen lots of favourites for us to sing. Our previous organist came from Cologne and conducted us, played the organ and also a trumpet solo with a local organist.

We had practised two songs to include as a surprise for her. Her favourites - one was "More than Words" by Extreme. For months, I had been planning to sing this in Latin (the bridegroom is a Latin teacher) and had put several hours into fitting it to the tune, after my husband had spent several evenings translating it (not easy for him, as he had trouble understanding the English, and had no idea how the song went). Despite all our efforts, I was late for the rehearsal where we were going to start working on this (Damn work again) and so the project was scrapped.

Never mind, the whole affair was a great success and she was very touched by our choice of songs.

The second "surprise" song was a really cheesy song by an Austrian singer (rather sing in Latin any day - the Austrian dialect is very difficult!) which, on singing several times, really got to you in the end, and we were all dabbing our eyes when she turned round and smiled at us - she was obviously completely taken by surprise.

Permission to sing the songs was no problem as the priest was one of the clique anyway - two of his cousins are in our choir.

The best part was that our ex-organist had managed to persuade his brother to play along with us. He is something of a local star and has a very solid classical guitar background, but plays rock and pop now and is really worth watching. It was a privilege to sing with the two brothers who are both brilliant in their own rights - one as a church musician and the other as a pop musician and when it came to the breaks in the two "surprise" songs they produced just the most breathtaking sounds.

After the last song - which was the Austrian one - the congregation burst into thunderous applause.

We could have gone on for ages, but there were 5 babies waiting outside to be baptised. And the Wedding Party had a table booked.

It was the perfect way to spend that glorious sunny October day.

*reaches for the last two remaining Kleenex*

You sound to have the most amazing musical life, TC!

The wedding sounds lovely. Thanks for sharing it!

all round!