last concert of the season

The new little hens came out of the chicken house with the fully grown fowl when I opened the hen house door this morning, which is an advance.  Previously they've waited in the egg box until the big scary hen and the rooster have gone out, and then made for the food hopper.  I can tell this because after the two older birds have emerged there is the sound of cheeping and small beaks tapping on galvanised iron from inside the house.  (I don't think it is conventional wisdom to keep the food hopper inside the hen house, but it stays dry that way, and is protected from any visiting rats at night when the door's shut.)  Coming out at the same time as the others gave the new small hens a chance to sample wet bread.  The old hen and the rooster were not keen on sharing their morning treat with the incomers, so the technique of the little hens was to grab one piece of bread and run away.  I don't see any signs of pecking or real bullying going on, so I'm relaxed on that front, but they haven't yet formed a united flock, the two oldies keeping themselves to themselves most of the time.  The new hens, while quite tame, are not used to being treated as pets, and are taking their time learning the concept of being given snacks.  The first time I sprinkled some Value sultanas for them, the old hen and the rooster came bustling over for their share, while the tiny chickens just looked at me blankly.  Food falling out of the sky was evidently not something they'd experienced.

This afternoon was the last music society concert of the season.  A string quartet was playing, who started with Haydn, finished with Brahms, and did the conventional classical music wheeze of including a piece of twentieth century music that approximately half the audience were not going to like as the second piece in the first half, just before the interval.  Today's piece of compulsory musical self improvement was Benjamin Britten's third string quartet.  I am afraid I fell into the half of the audience that didn't take to it.  It wasn't distressingly awful, but my mind wandered off to what I intended to do in the garden on Thursday, if it wasn't raining.  My fellow committee members all said they enjoyed it (or at least those who expressed an opinion did) but that's fine.  I'm sure I'm the most middle-brow member, but it needs one, to represent the half of the audience who don't especially like much twentieth century classical music.  Happily, the Haydn was good and the Brahms was completely wonderful.

The church has a new kitchen.  It now has a dishwasher, quiet enough to be run while events are taking place in the body of the church.  It isn't large enough to hold all the cups and saucers we use for a concert, but takes quite a lot, which helps break the back of the washing up.  There are two sinks replacing one before, which makes things easier.  Most significant of all, there is a new water boiler.  It takes only ten minutes to come to the boil, and we don't have to mess around with dials turning it down and trying to keep it just below boiling during the first half of the concert.  The tap runs faster too, so we had the first pots of tea on the go significantly faster than during our previous attempts.  The fridge and half the cupboards have moved around, so we kept looking in the wrong places for things, but overall it is a great improvement.  I think the verger and the vicar are both extremely proud of it.

The queue for tea did seem to stretch on forever, even with the upgraded kitchen.  We filled up two large tables with cups before the start, with milk in them, so that all we had to do was pour tea, but people refuse to move down and use the full length of the table.  Instead, they all want to take their tea from the first corner of the table they reach.  Maybe they feel that moving down feels like queue jumping (it's always a nice question of manners whether, in self-service cafes that have the hot drinks after the food cabinets and just before the tills, it is OK to overtake people who are having plates of food dished out to them, if all you want is a cup of tea.  I think it is, but some people won't).  Apart from the mass refusal to use a serving space more than about a metre wide, there did seem to be more people wanting tea than had been in the first half of the concert, but that must have been an illusion.  I don't think passers-by could really have been nipping into the church for a free cup of tea and a biscuit at the music society's expense.

One of my fellow volunteers questioned whether it was worth doing tea, as we washed up the last of the cups after the concert, when everyone else had headed off home.  I'm sure it's worth it.  That kind of event is a social occasion, as well as a cultural one, and people like to socialise over light refreshments.  Every decent club I've ever belonged to has had a break at some point in the proceedings for chat over a drink (normally beer, if it's a folk club).  I belonged for a while to a county garden trust, before giving up because, among other things, the organisers were so cliquey and the experience so unwelcoming.  One of the signs that all was not well was when they ditched the tea and biscuits.