Rachel’s Blog

A few months ago I received an email from  the Age Concern community development worker I work with, asking if I would like to take the Singing for Fun group to a festival in Long Wittenham, near Abingdon. This year was the 10th annual Wittfest, or Long Wittenham’s Charity Music Festival.  It is free to go along, and any money raised is divided between 2 charities. This year the charities were Pets as Therapy and Age Concern’s Singing for Health programme.

We were given a room from 4.30 in the afternoon, but the weather was so warm and beautiful, and the room a little small, we all decamped to the front garden of the pub….

Now, this side, you sing this bit....

It was great fun to be singing outside – many of the passers-by stopped to join in, and as we continued the crowd grew. At it’s height there must have been between 30 and 40 people, all singing in 4-part harmony.

As well as the act of singing together being a truly wonderful community activity in practice, it also serves as a living metaphor of Diversity + Unity = Harmony.

I was very pleased with the way our session went – the Singing for Fun and Health group from Abingdon really enjoyed themselves, and it was great for them to meet the Witney group, who were still on a high when I saw them on Wednesday. They all had a wonderful day out, and described Wittfest as ‘their own Glastonbury’. A great deal of credit is owed to Lucy Quinn and the proprietors of The Plough for the fantastic organisation that went into the weekend.

I think we’ve signed up for next year! You can view the photos here.

I want to draw attention to this wonderful choir based in London. Called Sing for Joy, it is made up of people with Parkinson’s Disease, and their friends and carers. It was initiated by two women who were diagnosed with PD and did not want to sit back and be medicated.

I heard these women speak at a conference last year, and there was something so inspiring about them. I felt they refused to be pathologised in a way so common in the healthcare system; you are your disease. And I felt it must be so empowering to feel, as someone with a life-changing condition, that there is a way of self-medicating, that something you are doing is helping, and you’re not just sitting back and letting someone prescribe drugs for you to passively swallow.

In fact, there is something about singing which is the antithesis of ‘passively swallowing’. Singing is powerfully life-affirming; I am still breathing. This is my voice. My voice. Do you hear me? Listen.