Catherine Power
When the Sacred Heart Simply Singing Group connected for the first time via Zoom on March 31st, 2020, we certainly didn’t think that more than a year later we would still be holding our weekly singing sessions online.
The group began meeting for a casual singing session, usually taking about 45 minutes, in the Sacred Heart Parish Centre in April 2018.
The relaxed, stress-free style of the sessions seemed to have huge appeal and from very humble beginnings, the group had grown to over 70 members by the time we met for the last time in person on March 10th last year.
Determined to stay in touch we moved online and last Tuesday (May 11th) we ‘celebrated’ our 50th week of online singing. We began on March 31st 2020, just after the first complete Lockdown had been announced. We did manage a few weeks off in August and again at Christmas but for the most part, those that tuned into our first online session return every week for their weekly singing ‘fix’.
Singing on Zoom is not for the faint-hearted, the time lag is terrible and it doesn’t suit everyone but at least half of the group have engaged from time to time while for many of us, it has become an essential and regular part of the week.
Zoom, a cloud-based video conferencing service you can use to virtually meet with others either by video or audio or both, has been a life saver for many people over the last 14 turbulent months, facilitating not only working from home but allowing huge numbers of people to remain in touch.
We would all much rather be meeting in person, but the Zoom app has at least kept the group together. With vaccinations continuing apace and the country beginning to open up again, we are hopeful that before too much longer we can look forward to our weekly singing sessions back in the Sacred Heart Parish Centre.
