Discussion: Nice work with the carols Blair

I was the only kid not allowed to sing in the bungendore school choir, i was under strict instructions to mouth the words ONLY! Sound like you might have copped a similar treatment had you gone to Bungendore Primary.

The only people I remember who love that song still are old school soil conservationsists. "The red dust is over the town" or something similar is cultural evidence of the poor soil con practices of a previous generation.

Being a Year 12 sandwiched between the Year 1s and the Year 7s meant my tune-free singing was somewhat more detectable than might otherwise have been expected in a crowd of 1400 or thereabouts.

No, I was there. I wasn't younger than Year 1 in 1988, as a moment's reflection would tell you ;) Actually I was in several of the less mass-production items, being somewhat more inclined at that age to choral singing than Blair, as well as in the 'beat the punters around the head with a cathedral' items.

I don't seem to remember finding the whole affair as eccentric then as it seems now (in particular, the insistence on doing one direction of the Canberra-Goulburn trip by train was just bizarre).

I couldn't remember whether you'd started in Year 7 or earlier. As for the train, I'm suspecting there was a train buff who was a mole in the organisation somewhere (it was then, and I imagine still is, the longest train ever to leave Canberra).

The other thing which sticks in my mind about the trip was the opportunities it provided for testing my mother's method for dealing with travel sickness amongst Year 1s (sticking a band-aid across their stomach).

Did it work?

Generally yes, surprisingly enough. I suspect the age limit for this technique doesn't extend much beyond Year 1, though.