Full Moon at Samhain

Bright-browed Lady
From whose spread cloak of light
The wild leaves fall
Rushing into the autumn’s first hard gale;
Ride with me through the ever-circling sky
As I prepare for my next pilgrimage.
Moon of the gathering dark
Be at my side tonight.
O opener of gateways,
May your powers guide
The wild hunt of the heart
With your wisdom of ending,
Your voice of summoning,
Discernment and wise dividing,
And calling of the ghosts of our honoured dead.
Through the door of the New Year,
Riding on the storm wind
In the cold-silvered night.

The darned laptop, and a bit of philosophising.

No, it was no good; that is one seriously ill laptop I am nursing there. I think it may have got a virus. I used one of those discs in an internet café a few months ago; it was a café I've used many times without trouble, but I guess that may have lulled me into thinking it was safe...

When I get my Dad's legacy in December I think I might treat myself to new laptop. A Mac laptop; the computer that speaks english instead of computerese. Now that would be nice.

It is particularly frustrating because I was making good headway on something, and am full of ideas to move another thing on. I'll have to go back to using the old-fashioned paper and pen method. Cor, real hand-made writing! - I'm such a retro chick.

Better news arrives from the box office of the Philharmonia, who, bless them, are holding three seats for me for a concert that is selling out fast, although my booking form has got lost in the postal strike. Now that is customer service! And it means I will get to worship at the altar of Joshua Bell at the end of March, and industrial action be dammed! I shall go to the ball; size eight glass slippers and all.

Had a very interesting conversation last night with my new housemate Jennifer (tall, thin, Hungarian/Canadian hybrid, a gentle rather absent minded young woman with a great sense of humour and a penchant for junk food). She had a near-fatal accident a few years ago and a near-death experience as a result, and was fascinating on the subject. She told me how strange it was trying to square in her mind the medical information about what really happens in such experiences with the overpowering vividness of what was an entirely objectively real experience to her at the time. She also spoke of how true it was for her that the brush with death gave her a strong sense of wanting to remake her life into something more fulfilling and less materialistic, and made her aware of the importance of living in the day and appreciating the moment. I still remember sitting in Christchurch on Ealing Broadway after I'd been told my ovarian cysts were normal cysts and not the pre-cancerous kind; and I agree with her wholeheartedly. Life is too precious to pass chasing after work promotions, power-based relationships, and new shoes.

So tonight I'll get out a nice, fat, clean notebook, and get on with some old-fashioned hand-made writing.

The darned laptop

Very tired and frustrated after an appallingly bad night’s sleep. My dear, ancient, antiquated laptop had a seizure last night and I’m not at all sure if it will be okay tonight. I’m going to go home after work and try switching it on, and see what happens. But it went so completely haywire yesterday – and in ways that I haven’t seen before – that I am seriously worried about it.

I had been writing for several hours, and was just going to back up what I’d been doing onto a disc, for safety – but the disc wouldn’t read. Then the next one wouldn’t, and nor would the one after that. All of them were discs I have used before, that in theory still had plenty of space on them. Then the machine decided to “rescue” the entire contents of one of the discs, without my asking it to do anything of the kind. It started making a horrendous roaring noise, and went on doing so for about twenty minutes while very, very slowly copying the disc onto the hard drive.

Then it wouldn’t shut down. In the end I just unplugged it, which is not a good thing to do at all; but the alternative was to leave it running all night, chirruping and clicking to itself at intervals, and getting hot (it gets very hot – it’s an antique, as I said). I knew I’d never sleep if I did that; so I crashed out of it instead. And then, of course, I didn’t sleep anyway.

Once I was well stuck in to the White Night thing, I began to sweat my way through a whole raft of minor concerns and worries, all of which at dead of night seemed disproportionately looming and monstrous. Would K be okay in her new flat? And has she got any bedding? – How is mum getting on as she gets over that mysterious bout of food poisoning, and should I have rung her more often, and would it help if I were to go down to Kent this weekend to see her? – Is P okay, after that odd reference to having “work done on the guts”? - Will I be able to afford the next gas bill? - Did I remember to put a stamp on that letter? – Did I remember to put my credit card details on that booking form? – Have I ever given the WWT my new address? – Have I ever given the Inland Revenue my new address? (I know I have, but once one is set on an all-night worry-fest one can get very bogged down in these irrational fears).

And, of course, round and round came the refrain – What if the laptop is permanently deaded, and everything I have on it is lost? I know I am not up to date in my backing-up-on-disc. That’s what I was trying to do last night, when it went kaput, krank unt möglich todt bin ich, bleaahh…

Woe’s me, woe’s me, I have been seduced by technology, and now it has shot me down. It was my man, but it done me wrong.

I never should have stopped writing in longhand on paper. It’s slower, true, and it has to be typed up afterwards, which is boring; but it is secure. I don’t lose sheets of paper, and they are unable to lose themselves spontaneously. The computer may facilitate, but when it goes wrong it causes far more trouble than my nerves can stand.

My "Private Passions" playlist

I've been working on this for a while; a little bit of fun. I don’t think I can cope with the eight-disc limit of “Desert Island Discs”, though, so I am insinuating myself into the far classier (& more flexible!) format of "Private Passions" instead. .

I’ll start with rock music and related areas:

Jazz/Folk: Spiro “Lightbox”. Just lately I cannot seem to get enough of this. Magical and mad, jazzy serialist versions of traditional tunes on traditional acoustic instruments - dancingly light yet rich music.
Jazz/Folk/Rock: Rodrigo y Gabriela “Rodrigo y Gabriela”. This is astonishingly high octane wow! stuff – hard to classify, though. Marvellous, rocky, acoustic Spanish guitar duets (+ a smoking arrangement of “Stairway to Heaven”); gutsy, grabbing music, totally energising and dynamic.
World/Blues: Ali Farka Touré “Red & Green”. Simply a classic. The late great AFT could do amazing things with that old steel-string guitar of his.
Rock: Channel Light Vessel “Automatic”. This is one of those “Soundtrack of my life” albums – especially it conjures a winter college field trip to Paris; sketching in the biting cold wind along the Seine, drinking cheap Sauvignon Blanc with friends in a scruffy spit-and-sawdust bar in Montmartre, and of course the miles and miles of rainy motorways in the Pas de Calais, seen from the window of the coach.
Rock: The Icicle Works “The Icicle Works". Just superb; rocking, poetic, dramatic. The crême de la crême of the eighties Liverpool scene.
Rock: Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon”. Another classic album, full of wonderful tracks that still hit the spot years after composition. “Wish you were here” comes a very close second, but is somehow, for my money, too personal; too visibly about the band themselves and their feelings for Syd Barrett, and hence in a way tangential to the listener. Whereas “Dark Side of the Moon” is rock truth for all of us.
Rock: Hawkwind “Quark, Strangeness and Charm”. There’s really nothing like the driving insanity, stunning rhythms and general bonkers wonder of this great, great album. Every track is terrific. And it has a song based on a Roger Zelazny novel. And jokes about Einstein. Visceral and yet intellectual, this is the album where Hawkwind got the balance between metal, sci-fi, pomp, psychodelia and straight-forward guitar-and-drum-driven rock absolutely right. My first ever rock concert was a Hawkwind gig; Maidstone Art College, 1979…
Rock (single): U2 “All I want is you”. Richly lifting lyrical guitar riffs, soaring and shifting; a lovely piece of complex simplicity, and great, honest, evocative lyrics.
Rock (single): Dexy’s Midnight Runners “Come on, Eileen”. A bit of a frivolous addition, but any time I hear this it makes me smile. This was the soundtrack to my sixteenth summer. Need I say more?

On to classical music.

I wish, incidentally, that the two classes of music (“classical” and popular/vernacular/rock) weren’t shut apart like ferocious beasts that would devour one another if they every made contact; it is rather like the Humanities/Sciences ne’er-the-twain-shall-meet thing, only worse, despite being on a smaller scale and within just the one art.

Chamber: The three Brahms Violin Sonatas. The G major sonata especially is a piece of music I could not live without. Oh, and I’ll have the Josef Suk and Julius Katchen recording, thanks.
Chamber: Schubert String Quartet in D minor “Death and the Maiden”. Another piece of music I simply couldn’t bear never to hear again. The first variation in the second movement is heartbreakingly beautiful. Brilliant simplicity; in fact damned close to perfection.
Piano: Janacek “On an Overgrown Path”. This makes me cry. Solo piano music, and it makes me cry.
Orchestral: Stravinsky “The Rite of Spring”. Preferably in a recording coupled with “The Firebird”. The “Rite” is stunning music, as passionate as life itself, and gives me a rush like a drug with its sheer wizardry and dazzledom. A world without Stravinsky would be a bitter, dull, tingle-less place.
Orchestral: Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. This is an incredibly tough one, actually; would I rather have the Barber, or the Walton, or the Stravinsky? Or the Sibelius? Or Elgar? Or Beethoven? Or should I ask for the Walton Violin and Viola concertos? On balance I’ll plump for the Barber, because I adore it, and because if I can have Joshua Bell’s recording then I’ll get the Walton and Bloch’s “Baal Shem” as well…
Orchestral + soloists: Mahler “Das Lied von der Erde”. Another very, very tough choice. Can I have a boxed set of all the Mahler Symphonies, plus a selection of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, please? If not, with tears in my eyes I will let the rest go, though 2, 3, 6 and 9 will have to be torn from my clutching hands; but I’ll hang on to the “Song of the Earth” even if you hit me. The Klemperer recording, please.
Choral: Vaughan Williams “A Sea Symphony”. Choosing one big choral work is hard, too; if I have this, I lose the “German Requiem”, all the other requiems including the “War Requiem”, the “Glagolithic Mass” (this hurts), Beethoven’s Ninth, and “Messiah”, and “The Dream of Gerontius”…
Honestly, this process is like chopping my fingers off one by one.
Choral: Rachmaninov “Vespers”. Okay, it will have to be two big choral works, because this is indispensible. Different kind of choral, though; unaccompanied liturgical singing, in Russian, with harmonies to make your hair stand on end. You can’t praise god any finer than this.
Opera: Janacek “The Cunning Little Vixen”. (I won’t even try to write the original Czech name – it’s full of x’s and z’s even before you get to the diacritical marks). One of the greatest, saddest, most beautiful and humane of twentieth century operas. I had to have an opera, and it is hard to choose, but since I can’t download my memories of great performances I’ve been at, my brain not being a computer, I’ll go for one of my all-time favourite recordings. The last scene of this is another of those things that makes me cry my eyes out. “From the House of the Dead”, also by Janacek, comes a very close second, but I think that final scene, and the love scene between the vixen and the fox, swing it for me. Also this is a fairy tale where the main character dies, and that is unusual; and it is probably the quietest, most realistic death in the whole of opera. She gets shot, she dies; two bars at most. I’ll have the Mackerras recording, please.

And a Leviathan in action

I should have also mentioned the concert itself, shouldn't I? Slightly odd one to start with, very cool and collected, Mendelsohn and Brahms. A little too cool for me, and I was left feeling a trifle unengaged. I'm not good at engaging with music using just my mind, I'm afraid. I guess I'm too somatotonic. I want the visceral, physical oomph of the music hitting me; the sensual pleasure of it. Live orchestral music can feel like being literally bathed in waves of sound; it caresses my skin and flashes through my guts, the vibrations entwining with my heartbeat and taking life as they meld with my own living tissue.

Last night this wasn't really happening at first. But then, after the interval, although we stayed with Brahms, the temperature was shoved up close to boiling by the monumental playing of Yefim Bronfman. This is one big man. Big in every sense, ability as well as build, and more than a match for this big concerto; he looks as if he could crack walnuts with one fingertip. He was terrific. He played with drama and precision, tightly together like twins in a neck-and-neck race, both the scale and the delicacy the piece needs, and he brought the house down.

I had heard good things of him, I went primarily for this, and the man (or should that be The Man?) delivered, in large, perfectly judged spadefuls.

Eavesdropping on the great and good...

Slightly weird experience last night at the Festival Hall, waiting for the concert to start. I was sitting quietly on a bench eating my sandwiches, and a very beautiful middle-aged asian woman sat down behind me talking to a bloke I never got a good look at. They chatted animatedly and it swiftly became apparent that they both worked in the performing arts; probably in dance; probably were connected to something happening at the QEH that same evening; and the penny dropped at this point. I was snooping on the private conversation of the (marvellous) choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh.

Note to self: Snooping is not nice. It is not nice even when it's snooping on an ordinary person like myself, and the Great and Good have the same right to privacy as I do. Do try to remember this, Dent, there's a good girl.

Good things - list for the day

Good things about this time of year; because I have to remind myself, being essentially a spring creature and not an autumn and winter one.

Russet apples. Picasso painted them, I eat them. Their strange, furry-looking skins and rich-flavoured, firm flesh are a joy of the season. Like the wonderful Discovery and Worcester Pearmain, they are strictly seasonal and are one of my reasons for continuing to live in the UK. Seriously – British apples are a reason to live here. Try Spanish apples if you don’t believe me.

Autumn leaves. Do I need to say more? Sheer beauty, and all the evanescence of spring with the added poignancy of fading and ending instead of new life…

Booking tickets. I’m partway through a binge of bookings for concerts and ballet and opera for the winter. As the weather gets colder and the days get darker, at least I have lots of goodies to look forward to, from Vieux Farka Touré, to two new pieces premiering at the Royal Ballet,
to this
to Stuart Skelton singing Boris in “Katya Kabanova” (can’t wait, can’t wait; have to wait, bah!).

Conifer pollen. I used to have dreadful hayfever in my twenties but it eased off gradually as the years went on, and by the time I started working at Kew it was a thing of the past. At this time of year a lot of coniferous trees are flowering, and if, like today, it is rainy (which is what they need, as it is via the action of raindrops that their flowers are pollinated), the paths and pavements around here are speckled and streaked with the pale gold dust of fallen pollen. It reminds me of the line in Seferis’ “A Word for Summer” – “A few pine needles left after the rains/Raggedly strewn, and red like tattered nets” – only with blonde pollen not rusty needles. As the rest of the northern hemisphere’s plant world thinks “Time to shut up shop for the winter”, conifers are going “It’s that time of year again – hey, let’s make babies!” On windy days the pollen dances off the trees in clouds, like millions of tiny blonde sprites leaping together into flight.

Evenings when the muse is tired, watching movies on my new dvd player. I tidied up my dvd collection last night, sorting it into feature films, opera and concerts, and ballet... In the process, whetting my appetite for a good wallow in all three categories. Next rainy evening, I think I might settle down to "Swan Lake", or possibly "The Devil's Backbone", or possibly "The Cunning Little Vixen" (which I have bought a new copy of since my old one has vanished into the unknown tender hands of someone else who likes Janacek...

Migratory birds. Redwings. Beautful geese flying in from the artic. Chilly afternoons at the London Wetland centre blowing on my numbed fingers, trying to draw Great Crested Grebes in their stark, spare winter plumage.

Winter walks in the arboretum here at Kew, listening to robins singing and nuthatches and goldcrests and long-tailed titmice trilling their signal calls, and soaking up the bleak, misty, dripping atmosphere under the dark pines.