So I departed my beloved Yorkshire village on Friday 4th September to return to this wonderful city in preparation for the start of freshers fortnight! I have had an amazing summer with the family and meeting up with old friends but it's time to continue the journey of a trumpet student at Conservatoire (that's music college for anyone who doesn't know. But not like sixth form. It's actually a degree course. Yes, music performance is a degree and a tough one at that!).
Since I returned I thought I'd quite like to share with the world what we actually get up to as it's pretty different to most unis and our schedules are quite frankly crazy. Very rarely are two weeks the same and you soon learn that a diary is your best friend and an essential item in your handbag/instrument case. The two are often interchangeable.
Now for most first years, freshers is a time for partying hard, sleeping in late and slacking on the practice a bit if we're honest. Or at least I must admit I did that a bit, but I definitely couldn't hack every night for two weeks! I don't blame them really, it's a great chance to meet people in a place you are totally unfamiliar and enjoy the first few weeks whilst you don't miss home!
This year, however, is a bit different. My friends and I tend to attend the more low-key events, or even organise our own occasionally (we all had Chinese take away together and had a potato peeling challenge...don't ask). There are fewer meetings for second years during freshers but the percentage of people practicing in the mornings has definitely increased! On Wednesday we even had our first quintet rehearsal of the year, which was wonderfully productive and great to play as an ensemble after 7 weeks of laborious lonesome summer holiday scales and technical exercises. It's great to have so much time on our hands, but we know it will be a shock to the system when term starts for real.
What do I do with all this time? Well besides practice, something else that has developed during my year so far at Conservatoire is my Christian faith. I hope no-one is foolish enough to stop reading simply because I said the word "Christian"? Exploring and talking about religion is such an important part of life I believe and especially in this vibrant, multicultural city, people need to be more accepting of others around them, myself included of course! The Christian Union where I study is made up of a great bunch of Christians from various walks of life and over the past week I have had the chance to spend more time with them than usual. We have prayer meetings, a picnic in the park, hand out water to those drunken freshers and today we had an international talk exploring the question "Is Christianity a Western religion?" I'd love to know your thoughts on this topic as we didn't go into much depth due to the unfortunate lack of international students who turned up. However, we did taste some fantastic home made Chinese food and planned our next CU events, so certainly not a waste of time! Whilst we're on the topic, my Vicar's wife just had a baby last week so although I'm not a particularly broody person I'm quite excited to meet her in a few weeks time!
I hope you've enjoyed this first blog post. I thought it'd be good to do as I was rereading my "Too Many Trumpets CoLab" blog from back in February and remembered how much I enjoyed it! Apologies for the lack of pictures and exciting stuff, we're only just getting started but while I get going, why don't you check out my website? www.sarahowensmusic.com (shameless plugging, whyever not).
S x
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