I woke up this morning with Matt Redman’s song 10,000 Reasons in my head. I love singing that song. One of those songs that you can really get ‘underneath’ to sing with gusto. Maybe it was the line, "The sun comes up/ it's a new day dawning/ It's time to sing your song again." The sky was clear and the ground frosted this morning and in another few minutes the sun is going to rise. At exactly 8.02 am.
We did a lot of singing when working in the bakery with my dad, though for some reason never in the first early hours. By early I mean from 4 am till 6 am. Is there a Dutch saying that goes something like, “If you are singing or laughing in the morning you will be crying at night?” I think my dad would say that if we were laughing or singing too early. 10,000 Reasons would have been a good bakery singing song. My dad had some favourites though and they were often the Old Genevan tunes. Singable probably because many of them were old bar tunes and folk songs before they made their way to church.
I don’t know if it was good for business but I think it must have been. From time to time customers would stick their heads around the corner to see what was going on in the back and I think they rather liked the fact that we seemed to enjoy our work, enough to sing while doing it. Many bakeries and restaurants are more open to their customers but I do like seeing the people who work behind the scenes taking joy in their labor and in each other. Is there a saying about how the flavor of food increases proportionally to the joy with which it was made? And there are 10,000 reasons to be singing.
Michael Davies photographer