Carols by candlelight

We had a fantastic time last night at the ‘Carols by Candlelight’ concert in London.

I met Jeff after work at 5pm at the train station and we headed into London – it was quite tight as the doors opened at 6:45pm, with the concert starting at 7:30pm, so we had already decided to grab something on the way. A couple of tube stops and changes and we were in Knightsbridge – I hadn’t been there for ages and had forgotten that it was home to Harrods, Harvey Nicks etc. The  buildings looked very festive with all the twinkly lights and I was suddenly annoyed with myself for not taking a days holiday, after all, we could have arrived when the store was still open and who knows what kind of things we could have bought?

Hunting for quick and easy food to eat thankfully didn’t prove too difficult. We found a Japanese ‘takeaway’ place called Wasabi which allowed you to mix and match your own sushi or take away some hot food in a box or tub. Sadly the sushi that they had didn’t look that edible, so Jeff and I got some chicken teriyaki and some katsu curry and hurried to the Royal Albert hall, only to stand outside by a wall and scoff the lot. I’m not entirely sure what the other ticket holders thought of us, stood by a wall, shoving chicken curry into our gob, but hey – it tasted great and was certainly better than going hungry!

We finally got into the hall at about 7:10pm, found our seats and sat down. We were in the arena so the view wasn’t overly great, but as we would be mostly singing and not watching the orchestra or choir, I don’t think it detracted too much from the whole experience. We got to sing LOADS of carols such as ‘Away in a manger’ and ‘Oh come all Ye faithful’  Jeff has a really good voice so it was quite intimidating trying not to sound completely tone deaf next to him – the fact there were loads of other people singing helped a lot.  It was really, really nice just listening to classical music with Jeff – he admitted to me that he hadn’t actually been to any concerts since we had split as none of his friends are really interested in it, nor was the lady he had a relationship with this year. It felt really nice that both of us were there and both genuinely wanted to be there – You know in a lot of relationships, someone has to compromise and do things to make the other person happy? Most of the time it seems to be the case that Jeff and I want to do the same thing, anyway.

The concert finished by 10:00pm and we didn’t stay for the encore – I felt a bit mean, however it would take us 2 hours to get back and my cough had started to play up again so I really just wanted to get back and go to sleep. We managed to get back to Jeff’s for 11:50pm which wasn’t bad considering the train was delayed at the station due to it ‘awaiting a train staff member’. I had a thoroughly fantastic night and thought it was a great ‘final thing’ to do in 2010 before we said goodbye to each other over the Christmas and New Year period.

-Molly