An open letter to Hawley Place School

I love that the school make the effort to put on concerts and shows, I really do. I especially love that, right from an early age, all the children are encouraged to perform, and I see many happy, confident children, who appear to feel largely at ease in a public performance. This is great, and while there may be some who will prefer, in later life, to be behind the scenes, I believe that this early exposure can only be a good thing.

However, there are a couple, well, a few, points I'd like, if I may, to make.

A few months ago I attended the school for "An Evening of Glee!", which was a truly inspirational performance. I gather this had been a follow on from a day of theatre and dance provided by an outside agent. Allow me to praise this excellent concert/show. It was one of the best things I've seen performed at the school. And do you want to know why it was so good? Of course you do.

It was good because it was short. It was good because every single number the girls performed had been practised until every girl performing was able to do the dances without looking round to check on their mates, and they were able to sing the songs in tune and in tempo. I know that, in any setting, there will be people who can sing better than others, but making sure that the girls know all the words, and have practised until they are confident goes a long way to making the whole sound a lot better. The girls were excited to perform in the show, and I was on the receiving end of none of the "We're supposed to do this song, but we've not had any time to practice it." whining to which I am usually subjected.

While the performance was not faultless (and this is much of the excitement of live music), nothing stands out as grating.

Let's revisit that "short" part, shall we? This performance was, by the time I watched it, compressed into a merciful 45 minutes. What? How can you have a performance lasting only 45 minutes? I was so surprised I actually checked my watch, and was hesitant to leave, in case I was going to be considered rude!

Now, let's move on to the normal Hawley Place concerts.

I’m really tired today because last night I had to pick up Lottie from the school after an evening performance of "Songs inspired by Hairspray." This thing went on until past 10:30.You'd have thought, given that this was an evening show, I'd have attended. Well, I probably would have done, except that the first I was aware of this show was when Lottie told me, either earlier this week, or late last week, that she would need to be in school by 7 o'clock. Yes, you read that right, the show was 3 hours long. The next indication that there was such a show was one of those aforementioned whines.

Have none of you ever heard of advertising? Marketing, maybe? No? Well let me explain. It's the method by which you inform your intended audience that something fabulous is coming. And no, I'm sorry, but the single line in the printed calendar isn't advertising. Since the calendar is a singularly opaque document in the first place, I find myself missing more than I see, despite my termly attempts to go through and mark everything and anything pertaining to my girls' year groups. In the junior school the children are encouraged to draw pictures of which the best/favourites are chosen to appear on the cover of the program handed out to the audience. That's not advertising or marketing, either.

It may be childish, but how about getting each girl to produce, either on the computer, or using pens/pencils/crayons and paper a poster. Enough of those plastered round the school should catch the odd eye, I'd have thought.

They are all, without exception, too damn long. Sure, I would like to see my girl sing. Of course I would, but given the number of girls in either the junior or senior school, I'm quite happy to see her do just the one number. Unfortunately, every single concert I've attended at the school has consisted of many (sometimes 4) songs from each group. Since this isn't limited to just year groups, but various vocal groups as well (not to mention the inevitable instrumental solos), 4 songs starts to look more like 40 songs for the entire of the junior school. And between each song, all the children need to be led on or off the stage and microphones need to be handed out or collected. All this change over routine adds minutes to each song, because getting children to sit/stand exactly where you want them is akin to herding kittens (or octopuses!)

In addition to which, I'm subjected, in the days leading up to the concert, to the cries of "I have to do a duet with Johnny, but we're not allowed to practice!", and "We haven't been given the words or tune, and we're supposed to sing it tomorrow!" Every time my girls say one of these things to me, my heart sinks a little, as I realise how shaky the performances are going to be.

Rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals. I'd say it again, but if you haven't got it now, it's never going to sink in. Allow me, if I may, to digress. When I was in secondary school, our choir group was asked, by the Sixth Form College, to learn the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. We rehearsed this for weeks, excited because we were going to be singing with the sixth form, in a proper concert. We were good! Well, as good as a school choir can be, you understand, but we were certainly confident, and had the words only because we were all to wear the same, and carry the crib sheet - it was the look the music director wanted. As it happened, we were great - when we sang the Hallelujah Chorus. Sadly we didn't realise that we were supposed to knowALL the choral parts of Handel's Messiah, so for everything else we tried hard not to raise our voices above those of the "proper" choir, because we were clueless.

And that's what you get if you don't allow the children to rehearse. As it happens, Handel's Messiah was a huge success, but it wasn't a success because of our school.

Last year both my girls were involved in a showcase for Renton Dance Studio, at which I know a number of your girls dance. They were, at the time, attending a tap class every Tuesday, and this class was given a dance to perform at the show. That's right, just the one dance. Some of the girls in the class attended more than one dance group, and thus were involved in more than one number in the show. But each class spent the entire term practising only their number until they were almost sick of it and the music for it. But do you know what the end result was? A fabulous showcase, highlighting the talents of the girls (and the organisational skills of the staff). Each dance was not too long, the changeovers between the numbers had been rehearsed so that each person knew where they were supposed to be at any time during the show.

But my question, today, is "Why can Hawley Place, with it's abundance of enthusiastic, energetic and talented teachers, not produce a performance of equal brevity and professionalism?"

Oh, I know, you've still got to teach lessons to the children. That'll be one of the excuses, wont it? But that's not good enough - you're trying to teach the children half a dozen songs for the show. Cut it down to one song for each performing group, and maybe they'll actually get to know the song they're supposed to be singing. And only teaching one song per group cannot be too much of a burden on the staff or cut into teaching time too much. Can it?

This one little change to the planning of your next concert could reap astounding rewards. The concert, instead of being discussed as the behemoth they usually are, will be praised by students and parents alike. We, the parents, will begin to look forward to, not dread, the coming shows.

THIS is how Marshmallow came to wake us at 02:30 this morning.

Lady Gaga at the O2

Last night was full of firsts. I had wondered whether to make this blog a bit of a rant about the Nokia navigation software, or a review of a really fun evening out. Because I can't make up my mind, it'll end up as a little of both, I expect.

Lottie and I went to see Lady Gaga at the O2 arena!

I've only recently discovered that I like Lady Gaga, having been a bit taken-aback by my first hearing of tracks like Poker Face and Bad Romance. However, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Bad Romance, and humming along to it whenever I heard it on the radio - it's not the easiest song to like, but it stuck with me. So when I found out that she was playing in England, I had a look, but tickets were only available for Manchester, which, with the best will in the world, is SO not going to happen. To my delight, on telling my niece that both the London dates appeared to be sold out, she informed me about Seatwave, a ticket exchange site. Now, while they may tell you they're a fan-to-fan ticket exchange, you can be sure they're not in it for the love!! Neither are the fans! They all want to get their money back, plus a little extra because they can. And Seatwave are making a damn fine living on this, too. Suffice it to say that our £50 tickets certainly didn't end up costing £100 for the two of us! I could, at this point, launch into a rant about "booking fees", something which caused RyanAir to lose me as a customer, probably for all time, but I'm concentrating on the happy of the event!

Over the weekend, in anticipation of the event, I had visited the Tube website to check that our route from Waterloo was still going to be the Jubilee line. I'd found no reason to suspect that we might have trouble with this, and so it was with quite some surprise that, on visiting the O2 web site (in the hope of finding out what sort of time I might expect the actual gig to start (the only information on the tickets was that the doors open at 1800), I found a great big box telling me that the Jubilee line was, in fact, NOT in service at all for the Bank Holiday!! OK, I'm no pansy, I can change my plans at a moment's notice! One thing I did learn, a fact of which I was completely unaware before this unexpected change, is that you can drive to the O2, and there are some vast car parks available. I toyed, briefly, with the idea of taking the train to London, and booking the Thames Clipper to get us to the O2, but there were only 2 stated boats available, one at 16:00, and one at 18:40, neither of which was really suitable for what we wanted. That idea being unworkable, I began to think about this driving plan. I mean, why ever not? The "special" price for pre-booked car park tickets for the show in question was £16.90 (including the aforementioned booking fee!!), and they had spaces. So I booked.

Allow me, for a moment, to digress. There was a part of me that remembered the horror of driving to Wembly Stadium (although I still remember, fondly, the Bruce Springsteen gig, to which I was driven on the back of a motor-cycle), and our complete inability to exit the car park after the gig - that was the Prince gig, to which I went with BMW sports and social, which is, by far the worst gig I've ever attended. Prince played for 1 hour. That's it. 1 hour. At Wembly. He then, after quite some time, came on and did 3 songs for the encore. 3 short songs. DAMN! We then sat in the car park for a further 45 minutes in the bus, first waiting for the rest of the S&C to arrive, and then for the bus to exit the car park, as thousands of fans streamed, probably unhappily, home. You can imagine my concern, I think?

I did spend some time fiddling round with the Nokia, trying to make the maps program navigate for me - after all, they've promised us free navigation, forever. I wont go into the whole thing, although at one point the program seemed to think that I was entitled to 11 free days of navigation between now and 31 August! Since that doesn't sound much like free navigation forever, I swiftly upgraded my copy of Maps from version 3.04(165) to version 3.04(165). Yeah - I dunno what's going on with that, but until I'd "upgraded", I couldn't get the free navigation forever part of it working for me.

Well, Nokia Maps has helped me out in the past, so I figured that unless I wanted to go round the M25 (on the evening of a Bank Holiday Monday? With all those holiday makers streaming home? Nu-uh!), I'd have to see what my phone could do for me. I'm not sure what sort of navigational decisions were made, but we ended up going the scenic route through London. Up the A316, down past the Kings road to Chelsea Embankment, across the river at MI6 (actually, that was pretty damn cool!), across various bits of London I've never seen, eliciting comments from Charlotte that London was a bit of a dump, and then across Tower Bridge, past the Gherkin, the Lord Mayor's office and the Tower of London - again, pretty cool! Actually, I lie - I know Elephant and Castle, but after Aldgate, I was completely at the mercy of the phone. Now, I say it seemed like a scenic route, but if you look at it on the map (I've started on the M3), you can clearly see that it's largely a straight line. I suspect that the detour at Earls Court was to avoid the congestion charging - I suppose it's not going to know that a) it's a bank holiday, or b) charging doesn't happen on bank holidays.

Actually, traffic aside (and there were some serious hold-ups after we'd crossed the river for the second time), we were directed wrongly only once. A turn that the sat-nav told me about, but about 10 seconds too late. An easy re-route.

Once at the Greenwich Peninsular, it was easy to find the O2 arena, and our car park. Inserting my card into the pre-paid entrance gate opened it smoothly, and within moments we were parked for the evening. It had taken us close on 2 hours to get there, but as always in London, it was the last quarter of the journey which took most of the time.

And so into the arena itself. After purchasing the obligatory merchandise (a t-shirt for Lottie and a flashing bangle for Lizzy), we decided we'd better get something to eat before the show. The choice of restaurants is huge - I saw a Slug & Lettuce pub, a Pizza Express and a Brazilian eatery before we found a Japanese sushi and bento place called Wasabi. I was delighted that Lottie, who isn't into Japanese food to quite the same extent that Lizzy is, said she'd rather like to try that. I've never been to a place where the dishes of food come round on little conveyor belts - not only was it pretty cool, but the food was largely good. I was a bit mean, not knowing how much we'd want to eat, and limited Lottie to the 3 cheapest dishes. The people with whom we shared a table were trying all colours of plates, including the violet and dark pink.

Satisfied after a lovely supper, we decided it was time to find our seats. And what seats they were. OK, I know, it's an arena, and there is, apparently, seating for 23,000 people - that's right, twenty three thousand!! So any seats we could afford were not going to be the really GOOD seats. Actually, they weren't bad seats, for all that they appeared to be up the side of a cliff, to which we'd have to cling in order to avoid falling headlong into the standing area. So precipitous was the climb, in fact, that Lottie spent the first 10 minutes after we'd removed our carabiners and coiled our ropes, pressed back in her seat, looking down with worry on her face. Thankfully it didn't take long to acclimatise to the constant danger, and by the time the concert started, we were able to dance with the rest of the audience. I have to confess, when Lady G shouted "Jump!", I'm afraid my response was more of a jiggle, because I really didn't feel comfortable getting both feet off the floor at the same time!

Oh! But she did a brilliant show. Costume changes every other song (indeed, some costumes saw only one song), light displays, a bit of a story, fire on the stage (now there's an accident waiting to happen), piano's, blood (stage blood, don't worry) and some great music made for a fantastic evening. I think that music tastes are so individual that I'm not going to try to convert you - either you enjoy Lady G, or you're not so keen. I enjoy the music, I find the spectacle delightful. I wouldn't want to criticise, but I'm surprised, given the lavish production of her videos, that the stage set was so, well, staid. Mind you, the monster and some of the more outrageous costumes made up for that. I have to say that by 22:20, on exiting the arena after the encore, Lottie and I were buzzing with pleasure!

Just before the encore, some people squeezed past us, so I explained to Lottie that sometimes people like to leave before the end of a show so they don't get caught up in the car park at the end of a show - remember Prince? I said, "Don't worry, we'll just sit in the car park as long as necessary so that you can see the whole show." But you know what? It took us maybe 10 minutes from getting into the car to being out of the car park. All those parking worries were unfounded.

Remembering our, um, interesting trek across London to get to our destination, I decided that our route home would be straight down the A2 and round the M25. That took us a bit less than an hour and a half!

I think the only thing wrong with the whole night was that my life would have been substantially better had Lottie NOT woken me at 02:30 this morning to tell me her hamster had escaped, and she'd woken to find him crawling on her! Yeah, could have done without that...