Grass

I've spent quite a lot of last week listening to Brahms' German Requiem, which is so beautiful. I didn't know it before one of the choirs I sing in started rehearsing it, but now it's one of my favourite choral pieces. Mind you, this makes it one of my favourite twenty or so choral pieces... my absolute favourite is generally the one I'm learning. But it's very special. We performed it last night - hence the last-week revision - and it was so exhilarating. I love singing in a big choir. The windows rattled in the doom-and-gloom bits! It's wonderful standing in the middle of such a huge sound - even the quiet parts are powerful when 80 people are singing pianissimo.

It does kind of make you think, though - singing about all flesh being like grass. The grass withers and its flowers fall away. Hmm. Yes. He was only in his mid-thirties when he wrote it (well, quite - gosh). His mother had recently died.

So today it was lovely to mess around in the garden with the little ones. It's very difficult to take good photos of Grandson these days. He doesn't stay still long enough. But Granddaughter's reactions aren't so fast and one gets occasional unblurry ones.

Grandson has always liked our little pebble pool.

The garden's becoming more and more colourful as spring burgeons.

Small boys do like playing with a stick.

My other choir is rehearsing Haydn's Nelson Mass and Te Deum, so I need to do some intensive singing along to those CDs in the kitchen for the next few weeks to polish them up. Lucky Mr L.