Two Choirs
13 April

Work gets little better at present.

But then, it was inevitable that after the departure of some 20% of the staff, we would be faced with a period of time when we were trying to cope with a schedule drawn up on the assumption of a full complement of staff. Hopefully, by the end of this month, we shall have sorted things out more to suit ourselves.

However, it is only the training team who appear to be really busy. Designers and programmers still seem to have plenty of time on their hands.

What the future holds I do not know. There was a meeting last Friday afternoon with senior managers. The basic tenor seemed to be that they wanted us to tell them how we were going to earn more money. Predictably, we all said very little. I shall show willing by offering myself to train people in Microsoft Office products (something I have offered regularly for the past four years) and to help with processing NVQs. It's stuff I can do standing on my head without too much sweat.

What I shall be avoiding is any opportunities to progress towards being either an Account Manager or a Project Manager. And I'm alert for any possibilities that my Mondays will be taken from me and that I shall have to work a five day week. I want to hang onto that little luxury for as long as I can.

I know I'll probably lose that extra day if I go into a full time job elsewhere but I'll face that when it happens. The new energy will probably carry me on. So far, I have two applications in to Liverpool City Council, one to Sefton Council and a fourth on my desk for Southport College. All are jobs I can do. All are jobs I might like to do. Quite whether they are jobs that will sustain me for long, only time would tell. Still, I need the practice in making applications and in attending interviews should that come to pass.

In among all of this I have been continuing with treats for David. I've been giving myself time to perform 15-20 minutes of yoga on most mornings. Consequently, my actual yoga practice on a Tuesday evening (and we had the last before Easter last Tuesday) has improved. I've been working particularly hard on my balances. Again, my left foot with its damaged ankle feels much more anchored to the floor than it ever used to be.

I had a very pleasant reiki session last Thursday. There have been no startling insights in these sessions for some time; it's mostly been about a reassuring sense of calm. However, my chakras keep resolutely turning anti-clockwise, feminine, ying. Sometime, they will revolve the other way again but I am where I am for the moment and for a reason I am sure.

I'm also continuing with my Quaker practice of which more later. I attended another Quest group meeting on Sunday. The four of us explored meanings of spirituality. Elizabeth, who is a member of the group and who leads the Full Moon Meditations, often gives me the most useful feeding. She talked about my changing jobs as a quest for new energy and, yes, I realised just how stale I have become at Connect. Maybe this is what I have forgotten - how much I re-invigorate myself by moving on. And she also talked about protecting oneself by closing down the chakra centres and how making the sign of the cross is exactly a way of doing that.

Come the evening, Ross and I headed back to Southport for a very pleasant meal at Pizza Express followed by a Palm Sunday concert by the Southport Bach Choir. In recent years, we've heard them perform Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 and Bach's Magnificat.

The main work on the bill of fayre this time was Mozart's Requiem. It was very good indeed even though, as Brian (a fellow Quaker and fellow audience member) put it, the text with all of its judgement, punishment and fear is not something which speaks to my condition.

The choir were augmented by the church choir and the orchestra (most of whom were freelance professionals) played very well. In fact they showed just how poor was the overall articulation of the Crosby Symphony Orchestra when we hear them in Mozart in February. Young soloists from the Royal Northern College of Music acquitted themselves with distinction. As with our last CSO concert, Ross felt too tired to stay for the second half and so we had an early bed. A three star experience.

Come Monday I had two meetings. The first was with a businessman named Bob Evans. I had been put in contact with him by Steve from work. I wasn't quite sure what to expect. He turned out to be younger than I had imagined. He turned out to have more of an agenda than I had imagined.

What he deals in is business coaching. He acts as a motivator. His primary tool is Neuro-Linguistic Programming. His primary message was that he could teach me how to unlearn learnt beliefs and behaviours. Whilst I am sure that he can, my feelings of doubt stem from the fact that he made it sound all too easy.

I have been around the personal development business for long enough to know that real growth and development is hard work and takes a lot of time and effort. I don't think that it is simply a matter of repeating a few mantras and the world is a better place - although, to be fair, I really am mis-representing him here.

I also wondered about his level of enthusiasm. On his desk was a framed certificate of excellence from the Liverpool Institute of Coaching. It gave five dates when he had attended seminars. All were in the last six months. In other words, I wonder whether all of this was the enthusiasm of a recent convert. He is rich enough to have the spare time to turn his hand to anything he likes. He has time on his hands. I think that this may be his latest little fad which, if it doesn't pay dividends in six months, he will chuck over in search of something else to fill his time.

However, and here is the big however, as he was talking I realised that I do all the things that he was doing at work five days a week with the young unemployed men who are my current customers. He was talking about £100 per session. Well, if you are a businessman who is looking to improve your turnover from half a million to three quarters of a million, then the investment is peanuts. And, should I chose to go freelance, he may be a useful contact and the fee would be tax deductible.

But, could I be a coach? I wonder. Actually Elizabeth from Quakers mentioned something similar to me a while back so maybe I need to ask her what she meant and how I would go about achieving it. And I probably need to ask Bob Evans about his training and where he got his certificate from.

So, maybe this was a useful meeting if not an immediately helpful one. The one big idea I've some away with is not an original one nor is it a world-shattering one; it is simply that I need to sort out in my own mind what it is I want to do before I start drifting into things. And this simply reflects a number of things that friends and family have said over the past few months. So, I have an exercise to do that will help me sort out my core beliefs and goals and I shall certainly do that over the next few days.

More importantly, come the evening two of my fellow Quakers came to visit Ross and I as part of my progress towards membership. Quakers being Quakers, there is both a formality of procedure to these sorts of occasions plus an abundance of humanity which allows for the fact that the formalities don't really matter that much.

In effect what happened was that the four of us chatted for a couple of hours over a cup of tea/coffee and a piece of cake. The conversation ranged over a wide variety of subjects political, philosophical, spiritual and social. In essence, they know me already. They know why I wish to become a Quaker. They have seen the process I have gone through over a period of two years or more. It has been a considered and deeply felt decision on my part. And this is how Quakers like to see things done.

Both Cherry and Roger were quick to tell us that it is not they who make any final decisions but rather it is Monthly Meeting. What they do as a result of talking with Ross and I is to present Monthly Meeting with information on which to base their decision. And they will show their report to us before passing it on to Monthly Meeting.

So, I expect that sometime during May I shall enter into membership of Hardshaw West Monthly Meting of the Christian Society of Friends commonly known as the Quakers.

Tuesday took me back into work for a short week in advance of Easter. I can't say that I'm getting much of a buzz from the work. And Wednesday gave us a staff meeting that was thinly attended because staff numbers are thin. We were told not a lot about the vision for the future but, hidden away in the subtext, there were a couple of interesting pointers.

We are making a bid to the DTI for development grant aid and we are taking advice from an external firm of consultants as to how to go about this (thus acknowledging that we don't always have the in-house expertise to do these things). And we have a new member of the Board who has industrial and marketing contacts - so maybe our CEO will actually have to listen to someone for a change.

Morale among the troops is low. However, I did have one interesting conversation with David who I resisted having on the training team. When talking about the fact that we might be looking to employ another salesperson, he said that poorly performing salespeople often moved from job to job by presenting well at interview and talking up their poor performance only to move on as achievements did not match expectations. He said that he felt that Colin (our CEO) would not see through this. He's right. He could have been describing his own interview.

So, when I got home and found that I'd been offered an interview for a job with Liverpool City Council, I was highly gratified. It's for a job working within Human Resources as a Learning and Development Co-ordinator encouraging employees to develop the skills and behaviours to deliver customer centred services.

Well, as a job description that could mean just about anything. But I'm pleased that I still have the ability to write a good letter of application and that I still appear to be desirable for interview. We'll see how the interview itself goes in late May. In the meantime, I'm going to continue looking for other jobs to apply for.

So, I was quite happy to meet up with Roland later on and go to Liverpool Cathedral for a choral concert. Last year, we attended a concert given by Ensemble 10/10 called Baltic Resonances and it was given in the Cathedral's Lady Chapel. We'd rather thought that this was going to be something similar.

It wasn't.

It turned out to be a full Liverpool Philharmonic Society Concert given in the main body of the church. The first half was accompanied by the orchestra and was a complete mess. We began with the final chorus from the Bach St Matthew Passion. I know this from the programme. In terms of what I heard it could have been just about anything. The acoustic simply did nothing for the music. Orchestral and choral sounds were muddied into a soupy wash of sound. It was horrible.

The ensuing pieces by Holst, Vaughan Williams and Elgar fared no better. Only a lush version of the Ave Maria sounded well. Mainly because it had probably been written with a resonant church acoustic in mind. Two stars is being generous. I could easily have left there and then.

And I would have missed a real treat.

In the second half, the orchestra disappeared. We began with the choir singing Rachmanminov's All-Night Vigil (Vespers) and at last I could hear the music. The choir were magnificent coping with chant and response, hushed harmonies and blazing affirmative climaxes. It was deeply moving and soothing.

Then came a strange piece of stage management. The choir left the podium. There was a pause and then cathedral staff entered with four large candelabra. They proceeded to light the candles. They left. A few lights went out. There was another pause.

And then, in full ecclesiastical costume, members of the cathedral singers filed out from the depths of the cathedral and took up a semi-circular position in front of the candles. They proceeded to give us a full, sung service of Tenebrae with the opening of Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet as the central anthem. It was quite stunning. And then they simply filed out again.

It was very, very good and I'm exceedingly glad that I did not duck out at the interval.