Let the music take you…high above the hillside…and away from all this ridiculously hard maths

I had another choir practice yesterday and enjoyed it so much that I came back home completely hyper. I stayed in for half an hour, had a cup of tea to calm down and then went for a walk around the campus.

It was about 10 o’clock when I was out and still really warm. It’s been so warm these last few weeks, and I’ve been amazed by all the foreign students that live in my building complaining about how cold it is. I’m wondering if living in Wales has made me a bit more hardy. Especially after last winter, which Rhian and I spent huddled in front of our gas heater in the lounge. People actually came round to our house solely to warm themselves up, because it was warmer than their house. At the same time I got the cold from hell which came with an incredibly irritating and painful cough that lasted for three weeks. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. COUGH COUGH COUGH. And so on.

ANYWAY…at ten o’clock there’s still a lot going on at Loughborough University. Lots of getting ready to go out was happening and it was a really nice atmosphere walking through the student village, where all the halls are. I stopped and sat down next to one of the many sports pitches on campus, on which three teams were practising – girls’ football, men’s lacrosse and girls’ lacrosse. It was all pretty confusing, probably because they weren’t playing proper games. They only stopped playing at 10.30, I was amazed that they were out so late.

Anyway…the choir practice was great. Here’s a rundown of what we're doing, and if you want to hear us there’s a concert in Loughborough on 7th December:
• Handel’s Messiah: And the Glory of the Lord, And He Shall Purify, Glory to God, His Yoke is Easy, and His Burthen is Light, Hallelujah
• O Magnum Mysterium
• Go, Tell It On the Mountain
• Riu, Riu, Chiu
• Here is the Little Door
• Gaudete
• Lullay my Liking
They’re all very nice apart from Go Tell It On The Mountain which is terrible, mostly because there’s a horribly embarrassing attempt to make it ‘cool’ at the end where the sopranos tell everyone to spread the Word on Facebook... *shudder*. O Magnum Mysterium is the best of all of them followed closely by Lullay my Liking. All the tunes that aren’t Handel’s Messiah are old Christmas songs, and they’re very lovely even if they look funny and unfamiliar :)

I’m having a clarinet lesson tomorrow, and going to a Church Orchestra practice on Sunday (it’s a short but boring story!). I think all the music playing is a bit of a reaction to the incredibly hard work I’ve been doing, and needing to get out of the house. And possibly also because there’s so much sport going on that I can’t take part in (I have back problems because of a slipped disc – it’s not a day-to-day problem but it means I can’t do anything to aggravate it like running). So music it is!

This week’s module is Solar 1, and I’m in the middle of writing up a very exciting lab report studying how temperature and irradiance (amount of sunlight) affect photovoltaic cells. Definitely not as bad as the Sustainability module, but still pretty difficult, and lots of very hard maths! We’re going on a field trip tomorrow, to a PV lab and then to a PV installation.

I went to a careers fair in Liverpool last week, which was basically as I was expecting (a big corporate affair, not really the sort of thing I’m interested in at the moment) but I did manage to pick up a bit of information that was useful. I also managed to pick up loads of free sweets and even scored some cake at Dundee Renewables :) I’m starting to get an idea of what I want to do after…something involving people I think. That’s as far as I’ve got at the moment! Well it's a start.