The Astronomer Royal delivered his promised Full Moons on September 7th and October 5th and served up our highest tides of the year…4.3 metres…at midnight three days later. A 4.2 tide comes with the November Moon on Guy Fawkes Day three weeks hence. But we end our Year of Non-Climate Change with a modest 3.7 on Luciadagen.

England’s Climate and Energy Politics by William Shepherd is now ready for digital publication on Guy Fawkes Day 2006. It is 35 000 words, 172-pages and 172x100x12mm in its present cesc publications format. For comparison the size of my 1987 Penguin edition of George Orwell’s Down & Out in Paris & London is 182x112x15mm.

It has been a busy week for indolent Journeyman Tenors. On Tuesday afternoon I was drafted into the Winchelsea Singers’ production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance for 3rd and 4th November as Samuel…the Pirate King’s sidekick. The bad news is that this gives me some lines to learn…singing and speaking…by Tuesday. The good news is I get to grab Kate and take her for my wife…against my will Pappa…against my will. Yeah! Sure!

On Saturday 21/10 Simply Opera will be presenting an evening of music from Mozart to Broadway at St Mary’s Church in Rye which meant rehearsals on Tuesday evening and Sunday afternoon this week. Ryesingers’ February performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida is now in rehearsal on Wednesday evenings. And yesterday Ryesingers treated themselves to a celebration party for their 35th anniversary…complete with After Dinner Cabaret. All this together with Paddy Harvey’s Sixtieth Birthday Celebration today made for a busy social calendar this week.

Everyone enjoyed last night’s party at the Rye Community Centre. There were about sixty of us there. One of our own did the catering. Françoise de Naillat joined me for the evening…motoring back and forth to Rye from her weekend of Glass-making in Rochester to join her Ryesingers friends. I spent ten pounds during the week getting kitted out at Rye Charity Shops…and then led the newly-formed Rye Barber Shop Quartet in their first ever stage performance.

Our Barber Shop Quartet came on towards the end of Ryesingers’ sixty minute programme which included a very witty rendering of Cinderella in monosyllables…the story is not complicated. It had everyone in stitches of laughter. Nobody knew the script-writer…but John Cleese, Ronnie Barker or Tony Hancock’s scriptwriters Galton & Simpson would have been pleased to claim the credit. Pam Peters…who plays Ruth the Pirate Maid of all Work in The Pirates of Penzance…also brought the house down with her Joyce Grenvillesque monologue.

The Ryesingers’ Cabaret was thrown together in three weeks. I had long harboured Barber Shop ambitions and an hour Googling turned up a one-minute MP3 snippet on the Cambridge Chord Company website of an arrangement of The Teddy Bear’s Picnic by their Musical Director Paul Davies.

A short flurry of e-mails and I had the sheet music in my hands…acquired in exchange for my promise to contribute to Chord Company funds. Drafting in Elspeth on piano was the next step…an unaccompanied stage appearance would have been reckless. But the big hurdle was getting the recruits to their first rehearsal…and commitment. Singers are invariably overcommitted.

It is hard to know how well you do in these situations. My ambition went no further than getting the four of us up on stage at the appointed hour. We followed the Teddy Bears with Gee Officer Krupke from West Side Story…a preview from the Simply Opera programme…and left the stage before the applause died away. But by eleven o’clock the audience were well enough inebriated to have clapped anything by David Peart, Andrew Hewitt and Ian Perry.

Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously so the evening must be rated a great success. Upon reflection it is hard to banish the Grumpy Old Man thought that this was the way things were in the Good Old Days when I was a boy…well a generation earlier than that…when there were no radios, televisions or MP3 Players and people made their own entertainment.

Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales gives some of the flavour of these old ways. We have lost more than we realise…notwithstanding the warnings from the likes of J.B.Priestley…in Lost Empires for instance. Perhaps these Good Old Days will return in my lifetime…hopefully by choice and not necessity.