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The High Life.


It’s hard to sing a top Bb discreetly in a tiny room in a shared office building without drawing attention to yourself.

I say “sing”, when I in fact mean “screech”. The reason for my repeated attempts to hit a note that's a tone out of my vocal range was I was putting together a jingle for this Sunday’s In Your Inner Ear, which we’re prerecording tonight. It wasn’t a pretty sound, I can tell you. It didn’t help that I was trying to achieve the impossible task of singing both full out and quietly at the same time. It's a good job there wasn’t a mirror in view, or I’d have been subjected to some strange facial expressions in the process.

The other people in the building must have heard me. It would have been hard not to. They probably wondered what the hell I was up to. “Why is the socially awkward half of those two blokes who rent that broom cupboard as a workspace shouting the word ‘life’ at the top of his voice?” they'd have thought (or words to that effect). “Is he in the midst of a Doctor Frankenstein-like experiment?”

I managed to pull it off in the end. I now have a temporary respite of a few days, before I have to sing a top B . If I’d kept the helium canister that used to live in my garage, I’d be laughing. Laughing and floating. 

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