Posts
It worries me, when I wake up on a Monday thinking "Drat, another Monday" and get to a Friday thinking "Oh good, it's Friday". It's the only life I'll get, after all, at least as me (as Rose MacCauley puts it so perfectly, "Whatever follows after, we shall not have this life again"), and I am wishing it away. But the summer is always the busiest time of the year at work, and this summer the "long-term short-staffed" problem is really starting to tell on everyone, too.
There is an early stage in that situation, when everyone is in agreement; we all have to knuckle down and do our bit to keep things going. One stretches a bit, takes on a bit more, finds it is feasible, finds that the pressure is still manageable; then one is asked to take on a bit more, and so is everyone else; and then a bit more again; and once again one grins and says "We can handle it, come on, folks, yo-heave-ho"... After all, there is really no alternative but to try one's best. None of us want to drop Kew in it; and no-one wants to be a slacker, even at the best of times, much less in difficult ones. But over time, as the pressure does not ease but grows incrementally, and the duration of the period for which this will go on increases, too, and the possibility of any improvement recedes steadily, one just gets, quite simply, tired. There's a point (which our team at least has reached some time ago) where there is absolutely no more slack to be taken up. Performing at full-stretch-plus for month after month starts to take its toll; and because everywhere one looks there is the same thing - over-stretched, worried people trying to hang on and do their best - one gets demoralised as well.
It is chiefly just tiredness, plain old tiredness. Compared to other places I've worked, which had much less serious staffing and financial stresses on them, there is an amazing lack of grumbling here. We all want to keep things going and not let our colleagues down. We almost all manage to keep the bigger picture in mind most of the time. But we are all so tired. And there is still no end in sight.
On a more cheerful note, the Gardens are looking wonderful, and despite some very gloomy weather forecasts last week, the Kew The Music open-air concerts were not rained on (well, about five minutes of drizzle, one evening, but otherwise dry).
I have finished re-reading "The Last of the Wine" (& cried my eyes out over it once again) and started on an entertaining murder mystery called "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Carola Dunn. Carola was at school with my stepmum Jane, and it is enormously pleasing to know that I have this tiny connection with a real, published author.
Carola's books make no attempt to be great literature, but they are enjoyable without being potboilers. Her characters are credible and likeable, she gives one enough of the clues that there is a hope of spotting the killer, and she describes Saffron Walden, where much of this latest story is set, well enough to leave me planning a visit some time this summer. Not bad for a straightforward piece of summer reading.
The Mary Renault also left me dreaming of travel, but going to Athens is a bit more of an undertaking. Besides, at the moment Athens might be rather an odd experience, owing to the strikes and demonstrations (with which I am in sympathy, but which nonetheless I don't want to get caught up in). There's a huge magic in waking up and drawing the curtains to see the Parthenon silhouetted against the morning sky. I shall have to go back there some time soon. Maybe I could manage a long weekend over the winter?
But for now, it's Friday and it's been another tiring week, and I'm looking forward to a couple of days off, not doing anything or going anywhere. I will tidy the garden, bake a cake, and finish Carola's book.
Friday, 15 July 2011
Friday, 8 July 2011
Kew Music week...
Always a hectic week, this, as the annual Kew summer picnic concerts happen. The telephone enquiry line is inundated with calls from people who haven’t read their advance information leaflets, people who’ve lost their tickets, people who are panicking about the iffy weather, and so forth. The 'phone hardly seems to stop ringing for most of each day.
It hasn't been all work and no play, though. On Monday night after work I went up to Trafalgar Square for another of the Big Screen events; managed to find my friends in the crowds, ate too much, and cried my eyes out at Kristine Opolais’ marvellous performance as Madam Butterfly.
On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, however, I went home exhausted after a solid day of ‘phone calls and no lunch break, and had a stiff drink and an early night.
Last night I was helping out at one of the concerts, handing out fundraising leaflets and directing people where to go, with all the enthusiasm and good cheer I could muster. I was released from this duty at about 8.00pm; managed to find my friends in a huge crowd for the second time in a week, and enjoyed a splendid concert from the inimitable Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. I also enjoyed the good company, some rather tasty paella, and probably a bit more to drink than was good for me. I danced a lot, the others danced a fair amount, the music was great, the atmosphere happy, the weather held fair apart from about five minutes of drizzle, and the final ten minute firework display was gorgeous.
Now I’m off to be a ticket tearer for tonight’s concert, so it's on with the bright smile and the cheerful energy again. Vesti la giubba, and all that. Actually ticket tearing is rather fun, in a crazy sort of way; but I am tired, and really looking forward to a quiet weekend after this.
It hasn't been all work and no play, though. On Monday night after work I went up to Trafalgar Square for another of the Big Screen events; managed to find my friends in the crowds, ate too much, and cried my eyes out at Kristine Opolais’ marvellous performance as Madam Butterfly.
On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, however, I went home exhausted after a solid day of ‘phone calls and no lunch break, and had a stiff drink and an early night.
Last night I was helping out at one of the concerts, handing out fundraising leaflets and directing people where to go, with all the enthusiasm and good cheer I could muster. I was released from this duty at about 8.00pm; managed to find my friends in a huge crowd for the second time in a week, and enjoyed a splendid concert from the inimitable Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. I also enjoyed the good company, some rather tasty paella, and probably a bit more to drink than was good for me. I danced a lot, the others danced a fair amount, the music was great, the atmosphere happy, the weather held fair apart from about five minutes of drizzle, and the final ten minute firework display was gorgeous.
Now I’m off to be a ticket tearer for tonight’s concert, so it's on with the bright smile and the cheerful energy again. Vesti la giubba, and all that. Actually ticket tearing is rather fun, in a crazy sort of way; but I am tired, and really looking forward to a quiet weekend after this.
Friday, 1 July 2011
Lovely afternoon
It's a lovely day, the best kind of summer weather; sunshine and puffs of snowy clouds, hot but not too hot, with a gentle breeze. I've just been out to buy some vegetables from the Kew Diploma Students, who sell the produce of their veg plots every Friday lunchtime (proceeds go towards funding a field trip). Just as I was raking in my purse to pay for my Swiss chard, purple beans, mangetout, radishes, basil and parsley, one of the students appeared at the sales table carrying bunches of sweet peas, so I added some of them as well. I now have them on my desk in a paper cup of water, and the scent is filling the whole office.
The Gardens are looking glorious, despite the way the weather lately has been veering from drought conditions through hailstorms to torrential rain, and back again. The waterlily pool by the Jodrell Laboratory is filled with floating cups of flowers, and buzzing with dragonflies; the lavenders are all in bloom, and the classic herbaceous borders in the Duke's Garden, just outside our office, are a picture of richness and colour; salvias, heucheras, geraniums, clematis, echinaceas, and great banks of daylilies in darkest mahogany and palest cream.
All that loveliness; and fresh-picked vegetables as well. I shall make a chard and fresh herb omelette for supper, and a salad of steamed beans and mangetout. It looks as though it will be a while before I have any of my own home-grown produce - my chard plants are tiny, ditto most of the tomatoes, and my beans are rampaging up their sticks (& anything else they can lay hold of) and producing masses of leaves, but no flowers as yet.
The Gardens are looking glorious, despite the way the weather lately has been veering from drought conditions through hailstorms to torrential rain, and back again. The waterlily pool by the Jodrell Laboratory is filled with floating cups of flowers, and buzzing with dragonflies; the lavenders are all in bloom, and the classic herbaceous borders in the Duke's Garden, just outside our office, are a picture of richness and colour; salvias, heucheras, geraniums, clematis, echinaceas, and great banks of daylilies in darkest mahogany and palest cream.
All that loveliness; and fresh-picked vegetables as well. I shall make a chard and fresh herb omelette for supper, and a salad of steamed beans and mangetout. It looks as though it will be a while before I have any of my own home-grown produce - my chard plants are tiny, ditto most of the tomatoes, and my beans are rampaging up their sticks (& anything else they can lay hold of) and producing masses of leaves, but no flowers as yet.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Hier, quand j'étais jeune...
On Monday I went back to an old haunt of mine.
Years ago, in my first real job, I worked at the Quaker International Centre in Bloomsbury, just north of the British Museum. I was, heaven help me, the deputy chef. It was a great job in many respects – I learned to cater for large numbers unfazed, and as it was a live-in post I also got to make the most of being based in central London, with museums and galleries, theatres, concert halls and cinemas all within half an hour’s journey. A live-in job has its bad side, of course; one can never really get away from work, and if one has a falling-out with a colleague, there’s no escape from it at the end of the day, there they are sitting opposite one at supper… And yes, in case you’re wondering, Quakers do have fallings-out, too, though they try to be very civilised about it. They’re only human!
Ten minutes walk from QIC, on Drummond Street, was the divine Diwana Bhel Poori House. For a hungry twenty-year-old who has spent all day cooking preposterous amounts of food for other people, a Diwana thali with friends was a perfect evening out. A great platter containing dal, sabzis, pappadums, puris, relishes, pulao rice, pickles, idlis or fritters, even a dollop of something creamy and cardamom-y for desert… For years it was my insider tip for visitors to London – go to Diwana, have a thali, you won’t regret it – and it left me with a serious addiction to bhel poori with sev. I’ve now found a similar place in Hammersmith and can get my fix without having to trail up to Euston, hurrah. Diwana is still there on Drummond Street, though.
Anyway, on Monday I met my stepmum Jane there for an early supper before she took the train to Milton Keynes for the fun of an OU Tutors’ first aid training session. It was the hottest day of the year so far and neither of us had the appetite for a thali, so we settled on dahi vada and dosas, and an indulgent mango lassi each. The dosas were tasty and very filling, the dahi vada – a sort of vegetarian dumpling served with tamarind chutney and fresh yoghurt – were delicious. We talked our heads off, catching up, putting the world to rights and gossiping about my brothers behind their backs (only kidding, guys!). Then I walked her up to Euston for her train.
And then, I was at a loose end, on a hot midsummer evening, back in the heart of my old stomping ground. I didn’t want to go straight back down into the Tube (which had been swelteringly hot and very smelly), so I wandered south and west through the back streets, thinking I’d pick up a westbound number 94 bus.
My route took me down the side of Gordon Square, where once I used to relax under the trees, and right past the old QIC building where I had lived and worked, and the University church where I once gave a reading, and through the streets and past the shops I used to know so well; and it had all changed.
Well; not quite all. The Square looked much the same; same tall London planes, same slightly unkempt grass and circle of rose beds in the middle. The church looked much the same, except in need of a good clean. But QIC seems to have been shut up completely, and most of the windows are boarded. And apart from the Marlborough Arms on the corner of Huntley Street, hardly a shop or café or restaurant was the same. The flower stalls had all gone, Apollo Food&Wine on the Tottenham Court Road had gone, the wonderful Italian ice-cream place opposite Heals had gone, Byzantium on Goodge Street had gone, and the Swiss deli on Charlotte Street, and the Greek taverna, and the Polish bakery...
I walked on feeling very strange, very yesterday-when-I-was-young. It is all so long ago, and that keen, clumsy girl I was is so long gone. It was salutary, and at first I felt very melancholy. But gradually as I walked on I began to feel better.
I would not turn the clock back for love or money, after all. It would be good, of course, to have again the physical vitality of my younger self. I am stouter and slower, and have less stamina, than the Imogen of those days. It would be good to have all the time ahead of me that she had, and for that matter the opportunities (had she but possessed the self-confidence to take advantage of them). But I was an awkward, desperate, cripplingly shy creature, tortured by my inability to make everyone happy, terrified both of solitude and of being overwhelmed by others’ lives and wishes. I lived in a fantasy world most of the time when I was not cooking, and my crushes, instead of being safely distant dancers and musicians, were guys I knew well and saw every day, whose proximity was a torment and whose rejection left me bent double with self-disgust. In short, I was a mess; and terribly, terribly young.
I don’t want to be that immature, unhappy, embittered young woman. I am fearfully glad I woke up, and grew up, and made the choices and decisions I made, and got to where I am today. My world is not perfect, not by a long pole; but it’s pretty good, nonetheless, and it is my own. My life now reflects who I am with a deep truth, and no amount of youthful energy restored could replace that self-knowledge and self-possession. And for this I am very grateful. So I didn’t look around me with any regret, after the first few shocks, but with surprise and a sense of amazement, and a growing feeling of peace, and I walked quietly along to Oxford Circus, and got the bus home.
Years ago, in my first real job, I worked at the Quaker International Centre in Bloomsbury, just north of the British Museum. I was, heaven help me, the deputy chef. It was a great job in many respects – I learned to cater for large numbers unfazed, and as it was a live-in post I also got to make the most of being based in central London, with museums and galleries, theatres, concert halls and cinemas all within half an hour’s journey. A live-in job has its bad side, of course; one can never really get away from work, and if one has a falling-out with a colleague, there’s no escape from it at the end of the day, there they are sitting opposite one at supper… And yes, in case you’re wondering, Quakers do have fallings-out, too, though they try to be very civilised about it. They’re only human!
Ten minutes walk from QIC, on Drummond Street, was the divine Diwana Bhel Poori House. For a hungry twenty-year-old who has spent all day cooking preposterous amounts of food for other people, a Diwana thali with friends was a perfect evening out. A great platter containing dal, sabzis, pappadums, puris, relishes, pulao rice, pickles, idlis or fritters, even a dollop of something creamy and cardamom-y for desert… For years it was my insider tip for visitors to London – go to Diwana, have a thali, you won’t regret it – and it left me with a serious addiction to bhel poori with sev. I’ve now found a similar place in Hammersmith and can get my fix without having to trail up to Euston, hurrah. Diwana is still there on Drummond Street, though.
Anyway, on Monday I met my stepmum Jane there for an early supper before she took the train to Milton Keynes for the fun of an OU Tutors’ first aid training session. It was the hottest day of the year so far and neither of us had the appetite for a thali, so we settled on dahi vada and dosas, and an indulgent mango lassi each. The dosas were tasty and very filling, the dahi vada – a sort of vegetarian dumpling served with tamarind chutney and fresh yoghurt – were delicious. We talked our heads off, catching up, putting the world to rights and gossiping about my brothers behind their backs (only kidding, guys!). Then I walked her up to Euston for her train.
And then, I was at a loose end, on a hot midsummer evening, back in the heart of my old stomping ground. I didn’t want to go straight back down into the Tube (which had been swelteringly hot and very smelly), so I wandered south and west through the back streets, thinking I’d pick up a westbound number 94 bus.
My route took me down the side of Gordon Square, where once I used to relax under the trees, and right past the old QIC building where I had lived and worked, and the University church where I once gave a reading, and through the streets and past the shops I used to know so well; and it had all changed.
Well; not quite all. The Square looked much the same; same tall London planes, same slightly unkempt grass and circle of rose beds in the middle. The church looked much the same, except in need of a good clean. But QIC seems to have been shut up completely, and most of the windows are boarded. And apart from the Marlborough Arms on the corner of Huntley Street, hardly a shop or café or restaurant was the same. The flower stalls had all gone, Apollo Food&Wine on the Tottenham Court Road had gone, the wonderful Italian ice-cream place opposite Heals had gone, Byzantium on Goodge Street had gone, and the Swiss deli on Charlotte Street, and the Greek taverna, and the Polish bakery...
I walked on feeling very strange, very yesterday-when-I-was-young. It is all so long ago, and that keen, clumsy girl I was is so long gone. It was salutary, and at first I felt very melancholy. But gradually as I walked on I began to feel better.
I would not turn the clock back for love or money, after all. It would be good, of course, to have again the physical vitality of my younger self. I am stouter and slower, and have less stamina, than the Imogen of those days. It would be good to have all the time ahead of me that she had, and for that matter the opportunities (had she but possessed the self-confidence to take advantage of them). But I was an awkward, desperate, cripplingly shy creature, tortured by my inability to make everyone happy, terrified both of solitude and of being overwhelmed by others’ lives and wishes. I lived in a fantasy world most of the time when I was not cooking, and my crushes, instead of being safely distant dancers and musicians, were guys I knew well and saw every day, whose proximity was a torment and whose rejection left me bent double with self-disgust. In short, I was a mess; and terribly, terribly young.
I don’t want to be that immature, unhappy, embittered young woman. I am fearfully glad I woke up, and grew up, and made the choices and decisions I made, and got to where I am today. My world is not perfect, not by a long pole; but it’s pretty good, nonetheless, and it is my own. My life now reflects who I am with a deep truth, and no amount of youthful energy restored could replace that self-knowledge and self-possession. And for this I am very grateful. So I didn’t look around me with any regret, after the first few shocks, but with surprise and a sense of amazement, and a growing feeling of peace, and I walked quietly along to Oxford Circus, and got the bus home.
Friday, 24 June 2011
More than half in love...
…with Christian Tetzlaff. Who I heard last night at the Royal Festival Hall, playing Bartok’s second violin concerto with the Philharmonia. Seriously, incandescently good stuff. Mr Tetzlaff looks uncannily like a miniaturised version of my cousin Richard (Richard is a very handsome cousin, but he’s also a very tall guy, and Mr Tetzlaff, erm, isn’t). Richard, however, is no musician, and Mr Tetzlaff is a dazzlingly good one.
I’m very lucky to live in a place where I get to hear lots of marvellous violinists; in the last eighteen months or so I’ve heard Christian Tetzlaff, Joshua Bell, Sergey Khatchatryan, Gil Shaham, Benjamin Schmid and Frank Peter Zimmermann, and that is quite a feast, I can tell you, even if they aren’t all quite as easy on the eye as Mr Tetzlaff. Mr Shaham is I suspect part hobbit (& part fiddle-playing demi-god), while Mr Zimmermann looks like a policeman in a borrowed suit, but every one of these men is an absolute joy to hear in action. Bearing in mind that I can also get to hear the world’s great pianists, the world’s great singers, the world’s great orchestras conducted by the world’s great conductors; London may have its down side but the up-side is a pretty big up.
That brings me neatly to the Proms. I’ve been trying to choose which ones to book this year. I’ve worked out a shortlist of six, but I really ought to cut that down a bit. All six have at least one really, really good reason not to drop them; favourite pieces, favourite musicians, things I’d just love to hear live (I mean, come on, the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, in the RAH, on that socking great organ of theirs? This I cannot miss)… I’ll have to skip “Elijah”, despite the superb line-up of soloists, as it’s on my mum’s birthday, and mum’s birthday is sacrosanct (and is always a day at the beach followed by a good curry or paella supper). But Tetzlaff playing Brahms? Shaham playing Bruch? Stuart Skelton singing Mahler? Britten’s Spring Symphony? Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Janacek, Sibelius? How am I to choose? I don’t think I can…
If I can get the cheapest seats (at the top at the side, or choir seats are okay), then it won’t kill the wallet. And there’s always the radio, after all, my great digital radio that has transformed radio-listening for me; and lots of the Proms are televised these days – I should check what’s being shown on BBC4 before I get down-in-the-mouth about the expense.
Here is my latest I-have-a-purple-crush poem:
To Christian Tetzlaff, playing Bartók
Vibrant disharmony, a pierced sunset
And the wide skies burning like a battlefield.
Slicing between discord and dancing, between
Lyrical terror and song, nothing’s so bright
As this plane of flame, which is sound, which is you
Wheeling undizzied as a gull in the gulf
Of air, with music pouring from your hands.
Bee caught in amber, golden-voiced, longing to dance,
Half of your blood is fire; you plunge
Humming, exploding into furrowed waves
And rise to arrow the dazzled heart. Your wings
Which are hands, are strings, phoenix of sound
Incandescent with energy in your burning field.
I’m very lucky to live in a place where I get to hear lots of marvellous violinists; in the last eighteen months or so I’ve heard Christian Tetzlaff, Joshua Bell, Sergey Khatchatryan, Gil Shaham, Benjamin Schmid and Frank Peter Zimmermann, and that is quite a feast, I can tell you, even if they aren’t all quite as easy on the eye as Mr Tetzlaff. Mr Shaham is I suspect part hobbit (& part fiddle-playing demi-god), while Mr Zimmermann looks like a policeman in a borrowed suit, but every one of these men is an absolute joy to hear in action. Bearing in mind that I can also get to hear the world’s great pianists, the world’s great singers, the world’s great orchestras conducted by the world’s great conductors; London may have its down side but the up-side is a pretty big up.
That brings me neatly to the Proms. I’ve been trying to choose which ones to book this year. I’ve worked out a shortlist of six, but I really ought to cut that down a bit. All six have at least one really, really good reason not to drop them; favourite pieces, favourite musicians, things I’d just love to hear live (I mean, come on, the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, in the RAH, on that socking great organ of theirs? This I cannot miss)… I’ll have to skip “Elijah”, despite the superb line-up of soloists, as it’s on my mum’s birthday, and mum’s birthday is sacrosanct (and is always a day at the beach followed by a good curry or paella supper). But Tetzlaff playing Brahms? Shaham playing Bruch? Stuart Skelton singing Mahler? Britten’s Spring Symphony? Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Janacek, Sibelius? How am I to choose? I don’t think I can…
If I can get the cheapest seats (at the top at the side, or choir seats are okay), then it won’t kill the wallet. And there’s always the radio, after all, my great digital radio that has transformed radio-listening for me; and lots of the Proms are televised these days – I should check what’s being shown on BBC4 before I get down-in-the-mouth about the expense.
Here is my latest I-have-a-purple-crush poem:
To Christian Tetzlaff, playing Bartók
Vibrant disharmony, a pierced sunset
And the wide skies burning like a battlefield.
Slicing between discord and dancing, between
Lyrical terror and song, nothing’s so bright
As this plane of flame, which is sound, which is you
Wheeling undizzied as a gull in the gulf
Of air, with music pouring from your hands.
Bee caught in amber, golden-voiced, longing to dance,
Half of your blood is fire; you plunge
Humming, exploding into furrowed waves
And rise to arrow the dazzled heart. Your wings
Which are hands, are strings, phoenix of sound
Incandescent with energy in your burning field.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Midsummer morris
How can there be any bitterness or any regret
Here, on Midsummer's Night? In the clear dark,
The pewter sky above, on the silver river
The black specks of geese sail gladly by.
The morris bells are ringing on the quiet green
Where the dancers leap and grin in the dusk
To summon summer's celebrating glance and
Spirit of life. Go, dance! Hearts, rise!
Crops grow, and hopes, and harvest thrive!
Here at midsummer on the bright Thames-side
I cannot admit of bitterness or regret
While the dusk-dark geese go sailing,
Alive through the silver of the midsummer night.
Here, on Midsummer's Night? In the clear dark,
The pewter sky above, on the silver river
The black specks of geese sail gladly by.
The morris bells are ringing on the quiet green
Where the dancers leap and grin in the dusk
To summon summer's celebrating glance and
Spirit of life. Go, dance! Hearts, rise!
Crops grow, and hopes, and harvest thrive!
Here at midsummer on the bright Thames-side
I cannot admit of bitterness or regret
While the dusk-dark geese go sailing,
Alive through the silver of the midsummer night.
Monday, 20 June 2011
The last of Cardiff Singer (& possibly the last of the summer, too)
Cardiff Singer is over for another two years, and I am bereft. For a whole week I have had the chance to listen to a bunch of talented young opera singers every night. Some of them were good, some were very good and some were really great. Some were absolutely wonderful. I now have bad withdrawal symptoms.
What a feast of glorious music it has been, and what a pleasure all those hard-working young people were, with their fine voices and their hopes for the future writ large on eager faces. I feel very dull and rather old when I listen to a twenty-four year old with more musical talent in their little finger, and more self-discipline and determination to succeed, than I have in all five foot nine and fourteen stone of me; but I also feel privileged to get to see them in action, so early in their careers, these kids. They are so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and full of delight in everything they do.
The Moldovan soprano, Valentina Nafornitsa, won the Grand Final. My favourite, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, won the Lieder Prize. I would have given him both prizes, but then I do love my baritones. Mr Bondarenko’s song recital was a sheer wonder from start to finish; effortlessly beautiful singing full of subtle, unforced sincerity and dramatic nuance, and with that incredible feeling of intimacy that a great recitalist can bring even to a big concert hall. At last Favourite Baritone has a worthy successor.
I’m going to see if by some miracle I can get a ticket to Glyndebourne next year – he is singing Marcello in “La Boheme” and I go slightly fluttery inside at the thought. As my late father used to say about certain sopranos, “Gulp, I think I’m in love”.
Despite the vital but restrictive necessity of being in for all the Cardiff broadcasts, I managed to get a good deal done this weekend, too. On Saturday I visited a lovely exhibition of modern Australian prints at the BM, and had a mooch afterwards in the minor Greece and Rome rooms – the ones with real things from real people’s lives and homes in – then spent a happy hour in an art materials shop (& didn’t buy anything stupid – just a few sensible things like a new sketchbook) and then in a sale at HMV on Oxford Street (& only bought one thing, a Dvd of “La Fille mal Gardée”), and had lunch out, and listened to a very good Hungarian band busking outside the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, and bought some concert and ENO tickets for the autumn.
On Sunday I sewed; I finally finished the poppy-print top, then cut out, pinned and tacked two more jobs, a plain straight summer frock in panels of two shades of blue, and a blouse I need to let out. Opening the under-arm seams and piecing in extra fabric on either side is a miserable, fiddly job, but I just relax, listen to the radio, and tell myself I am channelling my grandmothers’ spirits. To throw away a favourite blouse, in silk patchwork in shades of chestnut brown and burgundy, that always looked good, simply because I’ve put on so much weight, offends me. Realistically, I’m unlikely to lose the weight, and the sewing practice is good for me, so I’m going to let it out and get some more use out of it rather than beating myself up about getting stout. With the really twiddly parts, the cutting out and fitting and pinning and basting, all done, it’s just a question of mindlessly plying my needle now, and I can do that peacefully over the next few weeks while I watch tele or listen to music.
It’s just started to pour with rain; now that I can go home, it does this. Guess who didn’t bring an umbrella today? Really, after all these years living in my dear wet native land, you’d think I’d be more Great-British-summer-savvy!
What a feast of glorious music it has been, and what a pleasure all those hard-working young people were, with their fine voices and their hopes for the future writ large on eager faces. I feel very dull and rather old when I listen to a twenty-four year old with more musical talent in their little finger, and more self-discipline and determination to succeed, than I have in all five foot nine and fourteen stone of me; but I also feel privileged to get to see them in action, so early in their careers, these kids. They are so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and full of delight in everything they do.
The Moldovan soprano, Valentina Nafornitsa, won the Grand Final. My favourite, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, won the Lieder Prize. I would have given him both prizes, but then I do love my baritones. Mr Bondarenko’s song recital was a sheer wonder from start to finish; effortlessly beautiful singing full of subtle, unforced sincerity and dramatic nuance, and with that incredible feeling of intimacy that a great recitalist can bring even to a big concert hall. At last Favourite Baritone has a worthy successor.
I’m going to see if by some miracle I can get a ticket to Glyndebourne next year – he is singing Marcello in “La Boheme” and I go slightly fluttery inside at the thought. As my late father used to say about certain sopranos, “Gulp, I think I’m in love”.
Despite the vital but restrictive necessity of being in for all the Cardiff broadcasts, I managed to get a good deal done this weekend, too. On Saturday I visited a lovely exhibition of modern Australian prints at the BM, and had a mooch afterwards in the minor Greece and Rome rooms – the ones with real things from real people’s lives and homes in – then spent a happy hour in an art materials shop (& didn’t buy anything stupid – just a few sensible things like a new sketchbook) and then in a sale at HMV on Oxford Street (& only bought one thing, a Dvd of “La Fille mal Gardée”), and had lunch out, and listened to a very good Hungarian band busking outside the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, and bought some concert and ENO tickets for the autumn.
On Sunday I sewed; I finally finished the poppy-print top, then cut out, pinned and tacked two more jobs, a plain straight summer frock in panels of two shades of blue, and a blouse I need to let out. Opening the under-arm seams and piecing in extra fabric on either side is a miserable, fiddly job, but I just relax, listen to the radio, and tell myself I am channelling my grandmothers’ spirits. To throw away a favourite blouse, in silk patchwork in shades of chestnut brown and burgundy, that always looked good, simply because I’ve put on so much weight, offends me. Realistically, I’m unlikely to lose the weight, and the sewing practice is good for me, so I’m going to let it out and get some more use out of it rather than beating myself up about getting stout. With the really twiddly parts, the cutting out and fitting and pinning and basting, all done, it’s just a question of mindlessly plying my needle now, and I can do that peacefully over the next few weeks while I watch tele or listen to music.
It’s just started to pour with rain; now that I can go home, it does this. Guess who didn’t bring an umbrella today? Really, after all these years living in my dear wet native land, you’d think I’d be more Great-British-summer-savvy!
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