Carol Trouble

Utter disaster, total balls up. After all that work to get the carol service right it was completely cocked up by a ridiculous arse called Toby. Until we got to the church – nice little building, spruced up and full of Christmas cheer with holly and mistletoe all over the shop – no one had mentioned a word about Toby. Some friend of Mrs Boothby – god knows, after this total balls up I am not going to call her Patricia – who is, apparently, a bit of a musical chap, plays the bassoon and lives in London, over here for a Christmas visit. No wonder she’d kept the gurning little creep under wraps. I have to admit Monica and I were a little late for the service. Car wouldn’t start, then we had an argument about how to get there. We went my way, but regrettably Monica was right and we had to drive half round the country to find the place. Then there was nowhere to park nearby and I put the front wheels into the ditch. That’s the trouble with rural France, ditches everywhere, several feet deep and just an inch off the edge of the road.
I had my best shoes on which ended up covered in mud. Monica was wearing boots and was a bit holier than thou as I scrapped the mud off my brogues at the entrance to the church.
It was a pretty good turnout, quite a few faces I seemed to recognise, including Rupert and his hippy wife, Jeff and Megan and of course, Nora and Harold. She gave me quite a glare when she saw me, then looked the other way. Harold came up to shake my hand and stuttered out some kind of greeting. I didn’t see the embezzler there, probably in the chokey by now.
Mrs Boothby, clad in some kind of cloak, waved us up to the front. “This is Toby”, she said, indicating a young man with floppy blond hair, wearing what I can only describe as a knitted sack, probably something an adoring aunt had given him. “Toby is going to conduct,” she said. “He’s at the academy.” What academy she didn’t say, but in the light of what happened I would say the academy for the terminally insane.
We were all lined up, all twelve of us singers, facing the audience. There must have been about sixty crammed into the very small chapel, expectant faces like a nest of chicks expecting the imminent delivery of a worm. Toby rose to his feet and addressed them.
I will not inflict on my gentle readers exactly what he said, but it was a hundred yards of complete drivel. He went on and on about the history of the English carol, then about the music, then about himself, then about the carols again, then a bit more about himself. Talk about arse achingly boring. I could feel sixty sets of eyeballs drilling into him, wishing him dead. And then all of a sudden, he stopped, turned round to the choir (us), whipped one of those tuning pipe things out of his pocket, blew on it, yanked a baton out of the interstices of his knitted sack and started waving it frantically as though we all knew it was time to start.
By this time several of us were getting the giggles. Monica kicked me in the ankle. “Behave,” she whispered between gritted teeth. Well, we did our best in front of the gurning Toby. I have never seen so many maniacal expressions on one human face. And all the time I could see Mrs Boothby beaming away in the front row as her idiotic protégé proceeded to turn quite a nice little carol service into comic turn.
We were, of course, brilliant, in spite of Toby’s antics. The best thing we could do was entirely ignore his baton, which seemed to be knocking out a beat entirely different to our singing. And at the end he had the effrontery to say, as we left, that it would have been better if we had followed his beat.
We still had the problem of the car in the ditch. Monica said we’d have to be towed out, but I said, nonsense, I’ll reverse. All I got for my pains was an avalanche of mud up the windows. “Now what,” said Monica tersely. She wasn’t about to make a suggestion, so I got out, inspected the damage (the front of the car was somewhat deeper into the ditch), then went in search of someone to help. Just as I was wondering what next, there was a tap on my shoulder and there was Harold, stuttering away. “C,c,c,c,c,” he tried to say, and I saw he was pointing to his Landover, with Nora sitting stonily in the front seat. It wasn’t an offer I particularly wanted to accept, but when needs must… He was clearly well prepared with a tow rope and everything and in a moment or two managed to haul us out of the ditch, with only the loss of our front bumper.
“I hope you never, ever do that again,” was all Monica said, once we were driving back. I shall be having a few words with Mrs Boothby about all this.