We appreciated a cooler night for sleeping, after the constant heat of the past few weeks. Because today was another day of concentrated rehearsals, when we all got our first chance to rehearse with new singer, Catherine Mayoley, who has stepped in to replace Mish who had to drop out at the last moment because of a death in the family. While Catherine was familiar with most of the songs, this will be the first time she has performed with a steel band. We spent the morning session just familiarising ourselves with each other, and with the song arrangements.

We all went home for a bit of a rest over lunch and then back into it again at 1400h. By the end of the day, we were all feeling a bit more comfortable. Ruth and Catherine certainly seemed happy enough. And the weighlifters in an adjacent room of the gym couldn’t restrain their curiosity any more; towards the end of our session, a few heads popped around the door to see what was going on. One of them kept looking for the piano, so the soprano pans took that as a compliment!

After we finished, Nick Gambier and Annette Eastwood came down to the gym at 1600h, to rehearse the numbers that they will perform over the weekend, while Rita and I headed out to MusicenZone to collect microphones, speakers and other gear that we are renting for the weekend for all the bands.

The few lines above do not do justice to the effort that goes into the rehearsals, especially in a warm/hot gym with little ventilation. At the end of the 4-5 hours rehearsal for the day we are all totally knackered. But not Rita; after the MusicenZone trip, she was off with her Moissac gang to rehearse their traditional French music for the weekend!

After a bit of a rest, I heard voices down the quai a bit, so I realised that the pre-party was getting under way to reinforce last night’s learning experience at the pre-pre-party, and to introduce newcomers to the party school. Given that we have more rehearsals tomorrow morning, I left before the pre-party finished, which was still going strong several hours later.

As I was checking emails that night, I realised that we were still waiting for the FreeMobile SIM cards to initialise our accounts. Then I remembered getting some letters last week that I thought were bank statements; but on checking again they were our SIM cards. So I initialised them, and now we can close the SRF mobile phone accounts (but will keep the SRF WebTrotter dongle for a while, and hope to remember to cancel it before we leave France this year).