Thanks Jon. Happy to explain, thanks for asking. It's an annual contest for brass bands around the country. Bands are organised into sections, a bit like the football leagues. They can get promoted, or relegated, depending on contest results.

Every area of country has a regional qualifying contest. The top two bands from each area go forward to compete in the national finals. This year we (Chalford band) won the south west regional qualifier.

For our section (1st), the final is at Cheltenham race course. Every band plays the same test piece of music. This year it's a brand new work called 'St. James'. It depicts the fire of London, so as you can imagine, very dramatic and an enjoyable piece of music to play and listen to. Although you wouldn't want to hear it played 20 times!

It is going to be tough, as we're up against the best bands in the country. They have all won their regional qualifiers. So we'll see, but the band is very relaxed about it. The achievement was getting there in the first place. Contest starts about 3pm and we won't know the result until 10pm!

Well the result was not as good as we'd hoped. Came 15th out of 20 bands. And this is thing about brass band contests - however well you think you've played (and we did), if your interpretation of the music is not to the adjudicator's liking, then the performance won't rate highly. Of course technical accuracy and detail matter too, so there were certainly bands that created a better execution of the piece overall.

Got to remember also, that these are the 20 top bands nationally, so being ranked as 15th best is not a bad outcome.

But everyone was happy coming off the stage. We could not have played much better, and achieved our potential. Which is all anyone can hope for :)

I think coming 15th nationally is a massive achievement and you and the band should be proud of yourselves. Congratulations!

You are right are about how subjective this sort of thing is though. I can remember entering a music competition when I was younger and our band didn’t do as well as we hoped, mainly because the judges came from a Jazz background and our sound was more acoustic rock.

Hi Richard,

Welcome to the forum, it’s great to have you here with us.

I’m Laura, and my partner is Jon who is also here on the forum. We started Aunty Social World last summer as a community for introverts, as well as those who experience social anxiety. We’re a small but diverse group, all with different backgrounds, lifestyles and interests. Everyone is welcome here :).

I can imagine that being retired it’s important to have a routine and activities to focus on. The weather has been all over the place here too. We've just finished watching today’s stage in the Tour de France. If you like tennis, Andrew has started a thread about this in the ‘Hobbies and interests’ category 😊.

Sorry to read that your wife has not been well, and I hope all goes well with her transfusion tomorrow.

Great to meet you.

Laura

Same out west Mike, but you’re supposed to keep it in Barry remember 🤣.

Looking cool and calm here tomorrow 🤞

Hopefully some better weather here tomorrow as well. 🤞

Glad you had a good one Liz. Ours was good, just very busy with lots of things going on at once - looking forward to more of a usual pace this weekend 🚴🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️

Hope you have a good week 😊

Thank you. You too and enjoy this weekend.

This weekend I will be at Newark-on-Trent on Saturday, spending most of my time down by the canal. But seeing a friend also while down there.

Sunday I have no plans than being at home and going with the flow. 😊

Sounds great Liz. It's always nice to have weekend plans to look forward to, makes running the week that little bit easier.

Hope you have a relaxing one 🧘🏻‍♀️

Hope you had a good time and great that the access was good. Who did see?

Thanks Mike, the organisation and accessibility were 10/10. Never seen an event so well put together in terms of resources, it was brilliant.

You might have seen on Twitter but we were in our capital last night (Lumineers at Cardiff Castle).

The castle, how beautiful. It was glowing following sunset with birds sat up there, looking down on the crowd (probably for food).

It’s really tough, I just hope they’ll be ok with the weather being so rough here, but then again I’m sure they’ve trained for that. My GP is competing so I’m really excited to see her go for it, she’s awesome.

Great news about the house move, not so good about the estate agent but I’m glad you’ve found someone who is more suitable now. Fingers crossed for you Andrew, hope the viewing goes well.

Sounds fantastic Mike, great progress and I’m sure all will go fine with the presentation too! Go you 💪

Good to read that the weather is settled over your way as we’ll be travelling through later. It’s like the Wizard of Oz here today!