Gradually going round the national patron saints, I went to sing at a St George’s day service at a church I used to attend. There is now an occasional ‘festival choir’ instead of the one that used to sing every Sunday, though including many of the same people. And also some blasts from the past, including me I suppose, but also some returning children of choir members.
This is a known phenomenon of church choirs: the former members (generally children of existing members who’ve grown up and moved on) whose presence still lingers with those choirs in spirit. They will occasionally reappear, in particular to get married, and after you’ve been in the choir a few years you are assumed to know them well, even if you never actually overlapped with them in the choir. So far this is harmless enough, but it can get nasty. In one church choir I sang in (not in Bath!) I was always found inadequate by the mother of a former choir member who had left just before I joined, and whom I had in some sense replaced. When I met this daughter we got on perfectly happily, but as long as I remained in that choir I was seen as some sort of threat to her memory, even though she wasn’t ever going to come back!