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Fantastic singout at ‘A Night At The Movies’ as guests of Waltham St Lawrence Silver Band who entertained us with show tunes from Jaws, Harry Potter, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and many many more.

As always it was a pleasure being part of their show and what an amazing way to celebrate returning to the stage after two years away. Hopefully this is the start of many more collaborations with an amazing band that are the amazing Waltham St Lawrence Silver Band.

Well done to 4midable who entertained the audience with ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ and the tune from ‘Mission Impossible’ and Altern8te who sang ‘Moon River’.

Also congrats to four ladies who recently joined us and sang at their very first singout #Joysofentertaining #Returningtothestage

After two tough years we finally managed to get together for a social and have a belated Xmas dinner in March - we even had the crackers out - and in true Barbs style even managed to have a bit of a sing!

The Covid pandemic proved to be a very trying time for the Barberettes. For a group that loved to get together to not only socialise together but also sing having to resort to Zoom wasn't an easy task and unfortunately by the time we finally were able to be back together again physically saw our numbers dimish as the routine of our Wednesday get-togethers became something of the past for some of our members.

We where really pleased with our new home at the lovely St Nicolas Church in Earley and decided to hold a 3-week Learn to Sing course in September where we invited ladies to come and join us and see what we got up to on a Wednesday evening in the hopes that we would get some new members. We were really excited to welcome 15 visitors over these weeks and having shown them just what to expect 5 ladies become fully-fledged members on Wednesday 8th December and even managed to amaze us all by learning 11 songs that formed our Christmas repertoire for 2021 and joined us at our public singing event at Bracknell's Lexicon on Sunday 12th December.

No one could have foreseen how much life was going to change from March 2020 and the impact Covid would have on all our lives from wearing masks, queueing at supermarkets, working from home instead of going into the office daily, cancelled holidays and not being able to see family and friends for many months. One of the hardest restrictions I found was not being able to sing each week with the Barberettes in person.

So imagine my excitement when the government announced we could meet together in a group of 30 outside. So arrangements were made to meet in a local park on our usual rehearsal night, unfortunately the weather in May had different ideas so we had to postpone that evening and resume back to meeting on zoom.

For our first week back together the weather was much kinder, well at least it was dry but still cold so there we were gathered together, socially distanced sitting on our own chairs with coats on in the middle of a local park. All I can say is that the youngsters on the skate park must have wondered who were these ‘strange’ ladies who put masks on their faces and then started to sing. We were all very tentative on how this was going to work when we had not seen each other in person in some instances for over a year.  It was great to see chorus members had suddenly grown their legs back after just seeing their heads for the last 12 months on zoom !!

The 2^nd week felt much better not only as the weather was much warmer but you could feel friendships were beginning to resume where they had left off in March 2020 and the banter was beginning to return. We sat away from the skate park this week.

3^rd week – as a chorus we had been looking for a new home to rehearse on a permanent basis so thanks to members of the committee we could now rehearse in the gardens of a local church. To be honest this was such a relief as we had now the use of a toilet. The previous 2 weeks sitting in a local park with no toilets did give some us training in bladder control !!  Again we brought our own chairs, sat socially apart and with singing masks at the ready you could feel we all felt so much more relaxed than singing in the park.

4^th week – back at the local church which is now going to be our new permanent home with the sun shining – the Barberettes were back with a renewed positivity as we begin to rebuild after the lockdown experience.

5^th week – we are expecting some new ladies to come along and join us.

So here’s to the weeks, months ahead as we increase our stamina and vocals and become stronger as a chorus.