This time last year we moved house during a state of emergency. One year on and we are at home living with the strictest lockdown Japan has faced. The vaccine roll-out is the slowest amongst wealthy countries with something like 24 million doses sitting in freezers as we struggle to organise the roll-out. The government claims we will have finished vaccinating the elderly by the end of July but that would mean vaccinating about 800,000 people a day, and so far we are averaging less than 50,000 a day.

Just like last year the show I was directing has been cancelled as we can’t safely rehearse in person. But we are moving to do more things online. Today I am editing video files for Cozy Reads, and working on the soundscape for a new YouTube piece. I don’t know if the show I was due to direct in autumn will go ahead, so I am also trying to come up with ideas for content that will work online.

The TIP Youth season was cancelled, but I did manage to put together a workshop where we created a new musical from scratch, which was quite the challenge over zoom. Hopefully I get inspired to come up with other workshops that work over zoom.

I have finished my Advanced Professional Diploma in Teaching Contemporary Singing. I will hopefully get my results in the next couple of weeks. The course took me longer than I had hoped, as the pandemic caused a problem for the practical work, but I am very happy that I was able to pick this back up again and complete the course. I am doing my best to embrace teaching singing via zoom.

Things are not going as I would like, but at least I am being more creative than I was this time last year.