This weekend has been spent almost entirely on band stuff, which isn't ideal - I would really prefer not to have "double headers" of this sort. Still, I believe this is the last one for this year, so that's good.
Saturday was spent at the Grangemouth Gala Day, which was fine - a long parade followed by lunch and then a short massed bands performance. It was hot and sunny, so actually a fairly pleasant day all things considered. (Although I really don't like wearing sunblock, which seems to cause me all sorts of problems. Still, better than the alternative.)
Sunday was then spent at the Helensburgh Highland Games, where we resumed our competition season after a week off (and, since I missed the last competition, I resumed after two weeks off).
The day did not have an auspicious start - the bus took about 90 minutes to get there, but the driver took what seemed an especially winding route there, which meant I spent a lot of that time actually feeling quite sick. Still, we made it through.
The day was, again, hot and sunny. This is always nice, despite the sunblock issue. Additionally, we were fairly relaxed in our preparations, went on, played, and felt pretty good about it - probably our best performance of the year to date.
The rest of the day was okay, albeit boring. I spent most of it reading "Angela's Ashes", which I didn't quite manage to finish. There was an incident, which I'll come back to, but otherwise things were okay.
We came fourth out of five, which was a slightly disappointing result. That said, with so few competitors it's hard to know how we start in relation to other bands - we might have come fourth out of ten, or ninth. So it was at least fairly positive.
And then the journey home was okay. This time, our route took us through Glasgow and on the motorway, which made for a much more pleasant journey. I got home about 8 - a long day, but not the worst.
Alas, it wasn't long after that before my phone started to ring. As I said, there was an incident, part of which I saw but thought nothing of, but the rest of which I'd missed. But there's been a complaint about bullying made, which means of course that we have to take action. Not good.
(Plus, we found out on Friday that our free 'let' of the school we use for practices is going to cease to be free as of August, and since we don't have the money required to pay, we will simply have to find a new practice venue. Also not good. Sometimes it seems that everyone is really keen to have a local pipe band, but very few people actually want to help that band out. Oh well.)
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