As quickly as she recalled the whimsy of youth, Edwyn Collins and Riot Women helped Columnist of Year Dani Garavelli balance nostalgia and the never-ending demands of adulthood.

When I was knee-deep in children, and elbow-deep in washing, I used to fantasise about the day I’d join a choir again. I’d been in choirs as a teenager: good choirs, choirs that won competitions.

Ayr was blessed with the presence of two men who could turn the roughest of crows into lilting larks. Harry MacFarlane was the principal music teacher at my secondary school, and founder of the Choir of Ayrshire Voices and Ayr Amateur Opera. Raymond Bramwell was a music teacher at another school, and founder of the Arran Choir and Ayr Intimate Opera. Imagine: two competing opera companies in a town of fewer than 50,000!

Together, these men nurtured a love of Handel and Hayden in young people who spent their Tuesday afternoons taping the Radio 1 chart countdown. At Raymond’s funeral, his order of service was covered in tributes from those whose lives he had changed. That made me smile: scrawling pledges of lasting friendship on each other’s souvenir programmes was the way we marked the final performances of Ayr Intimate productions, staged in the Pavillion, a venue better known for heavy metal discos.

I was never good enough to be a soloist, but I wasn’t bothered. What thrilled me was the communal endeavour: the bringing together of all the different parts into one transcendent whole. To be a flapper girl in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience was fun; but when — under Raymond’s guidance — we sent Fauré’s Agnus Dei soaring into the rafters of a echoey church, what we experienced was something more: a spiritual ecstasy; a shot of jouissance powerful enough to keep the storms of adolescence at bay.

By the time I got to a place where rejoining a choir might........

© Herald Scotland