It’s miserable outside. I like the cooler air, but the grey skies and endless rain are not my favourite thing. Like many people I have been spending my days inside and now every excursion outside seems more difficult than it used to be.

Things are far from normal in Japan, even though the state of emergency has been lifted. We are allowed to travel between prefectures again, which I am hoping to do soon. But we still need to be careful about crowded spaces and being in close contact with other people. Last week I went to a recording studio for work, and I’ll be doing the same this weekend. I am happy to have more work but I hate that it means that I can’t see my friends. Going into the studio means that I meet up with strangers. I don’t know what their health is like or where they have been, so I feel that I have to self-isolate between these jobs.

I still don’t know what I’ll be doing for the rest of the year. My studies are on-hold and while I do have plans to direct and go back in to rehearsal in September the final decision has not yet been made as to whether that show will be postponed until next year. I need to put together proposals for summer work but the constant changing of plans has left me lacking in motivation. I have signed up for a couple of online conferences, so hopefully those will inspire me. For now, I’ll just listen to the rain.

May was a difficult month. Many of the things I had planned to be doing were cancelled or postponed. And some things ended up taking up far more time and effort that they should have because they had to be moved online.

Since the production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella I was directing was postponed until next year we got permission to make an at-home style video of a few of the songs. I am aware that the internet is now full of these tiled videos of singers performing at home, but they are very time consuming to make. They also involve video editing skills that I had to learn, but in the end I was happy with what we were able to do. (The video will only be up for a couple of months, and then our license will expire.)

I work with a youth theatre and we had our final classes online for the season at the weekend. We were not able to put on a live performance, but we did try an online one. I wrote a little about my experiences doing that, but I can’t wait until we can make theatre in person again.

Not everything about the lock-down is negative. I have been watching the recordings made at the Spheres of Singing conference that has been taking place virtually. They made asynchronous tickets available allowing me to watch these recordings without having to time shift to UK time. They are available for a limited amount of time, but I set the time aside to watch them and so far I’m enjoying the conference.