New musical discovery of the day

Walking back from town, I bumped into j4 on her way to sing carols in the craft-market opposite Trinity chapel; I wandered along, met the choir, discovered it contained pseudomonas and a number of other people that I vaguely recognised, and was convinced to help out by shaking a collecting tin. Indeed, two collecting tins.

Collecting tins, it emerges, make superb maracas; you get the drum-roll effect from shaking them side to side, various volumes of cymbal-like clash by shaking them up and down, and since there are slots in the base for your thumbs, you can slam them together quite hard to get a different range of percussive noises without risk of crushed thumb. 'Wassail, wassail' and 'Rudolf the Red-Nosed Raindeer' are particularly amenable to percussion accompaniment.

A really rather good four-part choir accompanied by a dancing lunatic playing percussion parts on the collecting tins turns out to make quite a lot of money; I suspect at least a hundred pounds ended up in the maracas by the time they stopped singing at 3:15, and it'll all go to the local childrens' hospice. After tea and treacle tart in Tatties, my fingers defrosted without further issue.