Twice a year a very fine local choir give a concert; the one before Christmas is inevitably Christmas pieces but for this season it has more freedom and this time performed the Haydn Te Deum, Schubert’s setting of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ and Cherubini's Requiem in C-minor (1816), commemorating the anniversary of the execution of King Louis XVI of France. It wasn’t clear if the requiem was a celebration of that event or in mourning for the monarch. I couldn’t read my programme notes because I forgot my glasses but on the whole, after checking out Wikki, it seems likely it had to be the former. Poor old Cherubini had friends in high places that he had to keep quiet about for a while after the Revolution.

So, for once, I left the cosy living room and TV and spent Saturday evening just a few steps across the road in the large church with fine acoustics listening to choral music. There was also the very enjoyable Handel Organ Concerto Op.7 No 4. (I managed to write down that detail after someone read the programme for me.) The organ is such an amazing instrument. It fills huge spaces yet can be frisky and flirtatious. That was perhaps the biggest treat of the evening though the choir was great, rather light on the tenor and basses - as usual far more women than men represented. There was an unorchestrated visual display too; during the Cherubini the setting sun shone piercingly red through one of the tall church windows for several minutes, It was so beautiful it nearly took my breath away.

Lately I’ve watched the BBC Young Musician of the Year contests and realised that there is a lot of wonderful music out there that I don’t know about and would like to hear more of. Music hasn’t been a feature of my life. Apart from Dylan, Cohen and Nick Drake, who touched me through their lyrics and their strange off-key growling or in Nick’s case haunting, voices I haven’t been a follower of popular music.

My father was Welsh, had the national talent for singing and also played the cornet well enough to be given all the solos and the Last Post on Remembrance Sunday. It was all ‘Praise the Lord’ stuff but I can’t hear a brass band to this day without crying a bit. None of his genes seem to have bothered with me, but g’son is good enough on his violin to play in the upper school orchestra although he’s still in the prep school.

After the concert a friend had invited me for cheese, wine and company. Two glasses of wine these days and I am tipsy so I got rather hot under the collar about the number of charity shops in town and found myself in conflict with a person for whom charity shops are the only ethical place to shop. Brrr!

The availability of cheap goods for those who genuinely can’t afford to clothe themselves from retailers is excellent. One, or even two charity shops in town would be very acceptable. What I can’t stand are the intelligent, educated, folk who could earn a reasonable wage who are living in poverty because they’ve chosen a certain way of life, deeming it to be more worthy. They then resent anyone who is making any profit at all and make a virtue of their own poverty, claiming the moral edge on the rest of the world because they are failing to make profit in their own field. The offender would probably also purport to be against supermarkets, but I’ve seen him often in Liddl. I wonder how he justifies that.

I also wonder what the charity shop habitués would do if all the distributors of new goods folded because nobody bought new any more? The prices of the remaining clothes items for instance, would go up immediately. People who rely on the CS’s for their wardrobe also rely on those who do buy new to keep the circulation going so they are literally living on the backs of those folk and there is a word for that sort of creature.

Which rant brings me back to Cherubini about whom a contemporary wrote: "some maintain his temper was very even, because he was always angry."

I’m not ALWAYS very angry!