We were all up at 6 this morning, leaving the house to clear dawn skies with a sickle moon and stars, for final rehearsals in the Cathedral; then at 08:10, after a few silent and tense minutes of waiting, the live Remembrance Day service. Robin in the choir of course, we in the congregation. Lo nearly got the giggles before the start, while suppressing a yawn, but it all went well. The choir handled Byrd's Kyrie, Psalm 61, Blatchley's For the Fallen and Rutter's Go Forth pretty well, and we all ploughed into the hymns with gusto. The Dean then treated us all to a cooked breakfast in Pilgrim's, and showed us pictures of his grandchildren. Robin also sang in the main service later in the morning, with bagpipes, Land of Our Fathers, etc. and was pretty knackered when he got home at lunchtime.

Having not sung seriously for about 22 years since Cambridge I found it strangely enjoyable, though the old chords are pretty tangled; three long rehearsals and then the live broadcast gave Naomi and the girls a valuable insight into the rigours and rewards of choir life.

Wanting to record the programme, I found that iPlayer only allows you to listen to radio programmes for 7 days, rather then download them for keeps. A bit of binging found this fantastic little tool, imaginatively named "Radio Downloader". It does exactly what it says on the tin. But then it turned out the file was about 37MB - a bit large for loading onto our blog. So I used Audacity to chop out almost of all the speaking parts to leave just the music, and reduced the bit rate to a minimum, resulting in the attached MP3 files of around 15MB. I hope I'm not committing some grievous copyright crime.