But if you try sometimes, you end up looking a bit silly

So I recently decided that I needed something to fill the Cbyv-shaped singing hole in my life and joined a 'political choir'. Little did I know it would also fill the ridiculous-things-to-write-about-shaped blogging hole in my life...

For it turns out that, as well as being a place to go and sing good songs with genuinely lovely people, this choir is like being in a particularly brilliant sit-com. It's run collectively, and the decision-making process is basically everything you might imagine would be produced by a well-meaning group of lefties taking certain things a tad too seriously.

To illustrate. Back when I was in Cbyv, we'd learn songs, and then we'd, you know, know those songs. We'd sing them again from time to time, unless they were rubbish, or too hard, in which case they'd be quietly dropped by a sort of tacit consensus.

In this choir, when you learn a new song, a collective decision has to be made on whether to take it into the repertoire. And, inevitably, that decision is preceded by an interminable discussion in which the song is taken apart and over-analysed until you are thoroughly sick of it and never want to sing it again.

A few weeks ago, someone taught us an arrangement of Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' with the Rolling Stones' 'you can't always get what you want'. It was supposed to be a wry comment on consumerism (ho ho). I thought it was pretty reasonable, if perhaps a little try-hard. But several people in the choir took issue with the final line – which, for those of you not familiar with the Rolling Stones' oeuvre, is 'you can't always get what you want – but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.'

Why, you might reasonably ask, would anyone get exercised about this bland and inoffensive lyric? Because – wait for it – SOME PEOPLE TRY THEIR WHOLE LIVES AND THEY DON'T GET WHAT THEY NEED.

I kid you not – we genuinely had a vote in which several people voted not to 'take the song into the repertoire' as it stood, because they felt that it was making some kind of obnoxious Thatcherite statement to the effect that if the poor only tried a little harder, they'd be alright.

Don't get me wrong – I get on really well with pretty much everyone in the choir and the people making this argument were no exception: they are nice, and I tend to agree with their politics. But really, the only response I can muster to this is '?!?!!'

[I was going to end this by saying I'll keep you posted, but since my blogging record has been patchy at best for the last few years, and the readership has dwindled correspondingly until there isn't really a 'you' to speak of, it seems a bit redundant.]