A rather polite hello to the other side of the pond

Good evening everybody. Or should I say good night? Ruth Iris is sleeping, at least (or, she is on this splendid picture, shot by no other than Pål M. Rake). But not me. No, I'm up doing what I do second best only to sleeping on a late Sunday night or early Monday morning: Blogging.

I have said it before, and I'll say it again. I play French horn in a school brass band, a fact that makes me per definition a bandgeek. To outsiders this might seem like an easy call in life, but it is fact not so. To become a good bandgeek, it is not enough to practise your on instrument, you have a much larger responsibility to think about. A Norwegian bandgeek, for example, has to make sure that on 16th of May, one of the mayor partying days of the year, he or she is relatively sober. If not, the parades on our national day (17th of May) would be lacking some of the grandness and power it normally possesses. Dozens of schoolchildren in ridiculous outfits (also called uniforms), trying to play some old marches and at the same time walk in line, really makes the difference. So, if the elders in the band had an abbreviated evening on the 16th, things might not work too well the next morning. It is though for all of us, but it is a sacrifice we will have to live with.

Another of these responsibilities is to keep up the myths of band camps. We can all thank the "American Pie"-movies for spawning these myths, or at least to bring them to the Egersundians and other ancient communities in Norway. But the Others (non-bandpeople) want more. They want to hear the real stories. So each year at least one greater gathering is needed, from where some juicy tales can be told. This year our quest for new band camp myths sent us over the North Sea, to a strange old island know to many as Great Britain. Halifax was the name of our destination, where Egersund Skolekorps' exchange band has it's nest. And there we stayed for the first week of July, making the most of the limited time a week was able to give us.

This post is not about those tales. It is just my way of saying hallo to whoever of my fellow band geeks who just now is visiting my blog for the first time. Hopefully, a more enlightening post about the trip will be ready soon, but I'm not giving anyone a guarantee. On the other hand, least I can tell you all that that next time I'm talking to some of the Others, I can tell them wondrous stories starting with the words: "And this one time, at band camp..."