#FluteDispute

Dear You,

I'm sorry for the gap in posts; I have spent Bank Holiday weekend in Cumbria, having fun and japes. And yourself? Actually, why does everyone else get a day off when it's called BANK holiday. A little greedy, if you ask me.

Anyway, I am going to tell you something that happened on Friday. Due to my lack of social calendar, as we all know, I do my wind band larks of a Friday. This Friday, we collaborated with a string orchestra; it looked peaky from the off.

We were practising a Wild West Medley, where we flutes do the 'wahowahowahhhh' bit of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We were the Good part, obviously, and there were some rather ugly members of their orchestra. Anyway, our conductor started having this massive bitch and moan about the volume of us flutes. Shall we evaluate the evidence, Mr. I'm The Conductor Therefore You Must Worship Me? Here we go then:

Exhibit A: We are seated behind an entire orchestra of strings who, occasionally, sound like a cat caught in a lawnmower. No offence.

Exhibit B: Not only is the placement of the flutes laughable, but the layout of our section is ludicrous. There's a good ten metres between the first and last players in the LINE of flutes. LINE. I ask you...

Exhibit C: The notes in question are of considerable depth, and almost unattainable by a generally high-pitched instrument.

I tell you, I felt like walking out. That, or getting him to try and play it as loudly as possible. THEN he tells us that he knows someone who can 'play as loudly as all of us on her own' or words to that effect. What he failed to acknowledge. however, was that this player was an above-Grade 8 flute TEACHER. Fool.

Furthermore, the conductor of the string orchestra (winner of 'I Belittle My Orchestra So Much That They Have Forgotten The Meaning Of Joy Competition' five years running) kept making smarmy comments about the tuning of the flutes! I got sassy (as spoken in the musical Bare, 'there is a black woman in the soul of every gay man'; my life) and uttered a few 'oh HELL NO's but to no avail.

If this continues, I may have to resort to bludgeoning someone to death with a large instrument. I mean a flute, for those dutty-minded few...

Yours pissed-offedly,

M.

P.S. Metamorphoses is a no-go; I've ordered the next one, which is Callirhoe, or however one spells it...