A is for Arditti, B is for Beethoven…

… and C is for catastrophe.

Oh dear. The Arditti Quartet did not come through triumphant with its recent performance of Beethoven's Grosse Fugue at the Bath Music Festival. The scrappy first note set the tone; the poor ensemble and tuning scuppered the piece. So much for hearing a performance bringing out the modernity of Beethoven's testing, puzzling string masterpiece. This just brought out the under-rehearsal. Seemed they'd saved their bowing hours for the Birtwistle, Dausapin and Schnittke that followed.

Bristol by boat

Gender equality

French fact. (Best look away now unless you like details about grammar.) As you probably know, French has masculine and feminine nouns. You have to make all your adjectives (and for other reasons sometimes your verb endings) agree in order to create sentences with harmony of the sexes. There is rhyme and reason to how you go about doing this, but not always. Why, for example, do you write 'la petite fille' for granddaughter, with an 'e' added to 'petit' to make everything agree, but do you leave 'la grand mere' without an 'e'? In fact, grande-mere means 'tall mother' not grandmother. Turns out 'grandmere' is a verbal relic, a hangover from the candlelit days of medieval French, when words stuck close to their Latin ancestors. And in Latin there was a group of adjectives (in the third declension if you must know) that don't make all the genders match up. Grand's great-great-great-[repeat as necessary] grandmother's etymological ancestor came from this set of nonconformist adjectives. So there you go. Spread the word. Go on, do.

Conundrum

Oh Beethoven. A crescendo through a tied note on the piano? How am I meant to play that?

Vincent in London

Vincent Van Gogh. Something of a magical charm, those three words, judging from the hordes at the latest exhibition of his work in London. It's ended now; I just managed to sneak in on the penultimate day. Thick skin and pointy elbows were needed, and tactics, especially if you're impatient (like me) and believe the worst way to look at a picture is as one of a four-deep crowd (guilty again). A quick scout round, and then I made a beeline for the three or four paintings that stood out for some reason. Here's the first, one of my favourites. Fishing boats at sea has a Japanese flavour that becomes even more apparent in the four ink versions he drew for friends. Face to face with this tableaux, the sea looks wild, the wind strains in the sails. 'The Mediterranean sea is a mackerel colour: in other words, changeable,' wrote Van Gogh, 'You do not always know whether it is green or purple, you do not always know if it is blue, as the next moment the ever-changing sheen has assumed a pink or a gray tint.’

New recipe

So, we've got Cameron flapjack combined with Clegg carrot cake. I've never tasted a carrot flapjack. Have you?