The soul of a city

At the heart of Bristol lies the harbour. I know this because a sign on the side of one of the hideously bland new blocks of flats that flank the waterside tells me so. A sign that claims this historic area for its own, and, even more grandly, says these abodes are helping to create a 'soul' in the centre of the city. Well, they've got the right place, but – I'm sorry – the harbourside doesn't need the help of these architectural soggy tissues to enrich its personality. This city already has that. Take a look at the signposts on the otherside of the walkway for a hint of what really makes Bristol tick. Porto Quay, Bordeaux Quay, Hanover Quay. Yes, voyages. Ships, sailors, foreign countries. The port has formed Bristol’s soul. And like any soul, there is both dark and light within it. That spark of adventure, spirit of daring is there – it was from this West Country city that John Cabot sailed to America (thinking it was Asia); but there’s also the other side – Bristol was one of the homes of the slave trade, this dirty money providing the means to build mansion-like houses for wealthy owners, as well as – more problematically for us now – fund schools, almshouses, and aid hospitals and churches. Bristol’s history is bound to the water. Of course, that's not true now. The harbour no longer welcomes trading ships, no longer has that buzz and exchange of goods, languages and tales. But Bristol is still a city of creativity and exploration. It's home to the BBC's Natural History Unit, the crucible for Concorde, the backdrop to countless hot air balloons. That's why I get infuriated every time I walk past that marketing board, and smile when I read the quay names. Yes, they're named after Bristol's twin cities rather than the places which boats set sail for on a regular basis, but they point to one of its most valuable qualities.

A Rose Window on Bach

We can compare Bach’s chorales and arias to the rose windows of cathedrals, in which reflections continually change from brilliant major to somber minor. These rose windows are the soul of the cathedrals and they speak to the innermost part of human beings. So too do Bach’s chorales and arias. They constitute the romantic element of his immense output and they speak to us like no other romanticism. (Walter Rummel: Credo d’un artiste [1950])

Rather a beautiful quote by the Romantic French pianist Walter Rummel, who transcribed parts of JS Bach's Cantatas for piano

Lincoln lights

The Lincoln Center: New York's home to dance, opera, theatre and music - and lots of lights.

Halloween, a la New York

Berio's 'Aldo'

The dynamic, inventive Aurora Orchestra hit Bristol this Halloween weekend. Their evening of what might be best described as 'concert theatre', called Thriller: Automatic Writing, was a great idea – intersperse music for varying numbers of chamber musicians with excerpts by a top horror writer to create an evening of spooky unease. I'm not sure it quite hung together – more of which later – but one of the musical gems included was Luciano Berio's 'Aldo' from Duets for Two Violins. Its hushed whisperings speak with a poignant simplicity. This is one of the only videos of it I could dig out from YouTube - the Aurora's players conjured a bit more magic - but it gives you a sense of it:

Voici que la saison décline

Voici que la saison décline,
L'ombre grandit, l'azur décroît,
Le vent fraîchit sur la colline,
L'oiseau frissonne, l'herbe a froid.

Août contre septembre lutte ;
L'océan n'a plus d'alcyon ;
Chaque jour perd une minute,
Chaque aurore pleure un rayon.

La mouche, comme prise au piège,
Est immobile à mon plafond ;
Et comme un blanc flocon de neige,
Petit à petit, l'été fond.

Victor Hugo

Last night in my French class, we read a beautiful poem by Victor Hugo. I can't find a translation online but, even if you don't speak French, just read it out loud. Each word has a wonderful sound, each line a telling rhythm, which come across irrespective of meaning. It's a three-verse gem full of evocative images: the shadows (l'ombre) are getting longer, the grass (l'herbe) feels the cold. A particularly well-crafted line, as another in my lesson pointed out, opens the second stanza: 'Août contre septembre lutte'. The lutte – struggle – is encapsulated by a line that's tricky to say, that rushes towards the word 'septembre', itself full of sonorous stiles to climb over.

Options

On the London tube yesterday, I looked down a row of seated passengers. Four of them, all next to each other. One was playing Solitaire on his phone; one was reading on a Sony eBook reader; another had their head in a free Metro newspaper; the final one had a paperback book. All enthralled by the written word (ignore the Solitaire), all choosing different mediums. Which would you go for?

Gorilla invasion

Bristol has been invaded by gorillas. All around the city, there are primates – lurking, guarding buildings, looking across the river, acting as bridge sentries. You name it, they've got it covered. They're chunky, powerful and pretty tall.

Perhaps I should point out at this point, if you hadn't already guessed, that these gorillas are statues. Decorated in a variety of colours and gaudy designs, the West Country gorillas – no relation to Liverpool's lambananas – are here to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Bristol zoo.

But, suddenly, after seeing Project NIm – the film about a misguided 1970s experiment to find out whether chimps could learn language and communicate with human beings (conclusion: yes, they can sign language; no, they can't say a lot more than 'I want berries', 'I want to drink', 'I want to play') – their presence here has taken on a slightly more ominous hue. I'd better not watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes then…

Gorisambard

Meet the suavest gorilla in town: Gorisambard.

Wedding bells

At a wedding in a gorgeous old church buried in the English countryside this weekend, there were some beautiful readings and some uplifting singing. Here are two of my favourite moments: a touching piece by American writer Raymond Carver, and William Harris's luxuriant setting of a text by Edmund Spenser.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

Faire is the heaven

Vive le carrousel!

Why is it that so many French cities have carousels in their centres? Lyon has one in the Place de la République, Paris has them aplenty, including in the Jardins de Plantes and Les Tuileries, while Aix-en-Provence has one at the foot of its Champs-Elysées – the Cours Mirabeau. Is it a necessary bureaucratic requirement? A tradition passed on from merry-go-round-loving parent to child? A way of sprucing up a town centre? Enchanted by the touch of magical whimsy it adds to a city, I thought I'd try to find out a bit more. Turns out the merry-go-round has a long history in France: while it was probably invented in Italy, when Louis XIV was in need of some entertainment for a lavish party, he ordered his engineers to build a carousel. It hid gilded chairs for women, and horses and swans for the men. Merci Louis, et vive le carrousel!

The gorillas have arrived

The long wait for lunch…

Back to blogging

Blog silence over! A new job and a new house has added up to little more than some unpublished blank pages. Oh, I've had a few things to blog about (I say this with certainty only because I seem to blog about this, that and nothing in particular in any case), but somehow I haven't managed to put, if not pen to paper, finger to keyboard. But, as with everything, once you get back in the habit, there's always time. More to follow…

Russian monarchs

Spotted in a Bristol window…

Bartók's Violinists (1)

Bela Bartók was a pianist – and a pretty darn good one at that – but he also had a bit of a thing for the violin. While his own experience could furnish him with the necessary knowledge to write everything from pedagogical exercises (Mikrokosmos) to dazzling showcase pieces (the Piano Concertos) for the piano, he turned to others for inspiration when it came to the violin. Behind each of the Hungarian composer's violin works, then, you're likely to find a real person, a tantalising story, enshrined in music.

It started with Stefi Geyer. Bartók was infatuated with the young violinist, and in 1907, when she was 17 and he was 26, wrote her a Concerto. Spilling the beans about the intensity of his feeling for her in his letters only seems to have served to make her run…

Here's a taste of her playing:



And here's the lushly Romantic, rarely played First Violin Concerto that Bartók penned for her. The first movement was, he wrote, 'the idealised Stefi, celestial and inward'; she herself described it as a portrait of 'the young girl he loved'.

Road rage à la francaise

It’s a la mode, at the moment, the ‘velo’. Boris bikes in London, vélibs in Paris (shame Bristol, the UK’s ‘No. 1’ cycling city has ditched its scheme). But hopping on to a free bike isn’t without its perils. The obvious challenges of the free-for-all Etoiles roundabout aside, there’s the two-wheel version of road rage to contend with: Velib vitriol, let’s call it. Queuing up outside the Hotel de Ville for the Impressionists exhibition (free, fantastic, for more, check back here), a little vignette amused me. An impeccably chic French woman in her 40s, clothed in a little black coat and sporting little lunettes, tottered in on her unwieldy vélib. Alas, no space to be seen. As she wobbled up and down the row of bikes, hoping, perhaps, that one of the parked cycles might disappear, she made the fatal mistake of not checking behind her. Et allez, hop, a cyclist zipped out of their space, et voila, another - zut, alors - someone else! - nipped in. Eagle-eyes and a killer instinct are, clearly, necessary accessories for any Parisian cyclists, ones this rider, for all her elegance, didn’t possess: ‘I’ve been waiting for ten minutes!’ she shouted, practically hitting the unchivalrous usurper with her handbag, '10 minutes!’ (All the while notching up the euros, if she was already over half an hour.) ‘I’m not scared of you,’ he flashed back (Yes, he did actually say this). ’10 minutes!’ Cue flurry of French abuse. The queue, at that point, moved on; the Velibtriol faded into the distance.

Thought

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene

Happy Birthday Brahms

Here's the Poco allegretto from his Symphony No. 3, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Fürtwangler.

Scenes from Paris (1)

The Kiss in the Musée Rodin. The French sculptor's famous depiction of the tragic lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malaesta is, simply, stunning. I've never seen any of Rodin's sculptures 'in the flesh' before. And it does feel like these marble and bronze masterpieces are, somehow, alive. Walking around the Parisian home of his sculptures – a house and gardens – it doesn't seem too ridiculous a flight of fancy that, perhaps, when your back is turned or after the key is turned in the gate lock at night and darkness has fallen, the sculptures draw breath, step off their plinths and go for a saunter and a steak-frites.

Ferrier finale

The Kathleen Ferrier Award finals are this evening in the Wigmore Hall. Three cheers for the fantastic Yshani Perinpanaygam, who'll be accompanying soprano Elena Sancho in them. I'll be crossing fingers they win! I should add in a disclaimer that as I know Yshani this is a biased post, but it's not needed as she's such a wonderful accompanist, and her playing speaks for itself… Good luck!

Lieberson

Peter Lieberson, the American composer, has died. I'd only recently discovered his work, led to it through the incomparably sublime voice of the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whom he married in 1999. His luscious settings of five love poems by Pablo Neruda were composed for her – Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs shimmer in this music, although there's a flavour of their South American heritage too – and their story is poignant. As the singer traces the tale of love from first flush to death do us part, the knowledge that Hunt Lieberson was battling breast cancer at the time of their writing is hard to forget. Tragically, she died in 2006. In this extract, recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine, Hunt Lieberson sings 'Amor mio, si muero y tu no mueres':

My love, if I die and you don't, let's not give grief an even greater field...this meadow where we find ourselves, O little infinity! We give it back. But Love, this love has not ended, it is like a long river."

Paris in the Springtime

The countdown to my trip to la belle France begins. Time for a little Ella…

Moonlight

XIX

The moonlight when it shines on the grass,
I don’t know what it reminds me of...
It reminds me of my old maid
Telling me fairy tales.
And Our Lady dressed as a beggar
Helping mistreated children...

If I can’t believe they’re true anymore,
Why does the moonlight shine on the grass?

(3/4/1914)

From The Keeper of Flocks by Alberto Caeiro

Tomorrow's Tangle

This is a temporary photo taken on my phone, to be replaced by a hypothetically better one from my camera this weekend. There's a wonderfully evocative gate – if a gate can be such a thing – in Bristol that opens on to stone steps winding up the hillside slopes of Cliftonwood to the summit of Clifton Village. Made of iron, the archway's now so rusty it looks like it might shiver and crumble if you dared to touch it. Amid leaves and curls runs a motto beginning 'Tomorrow's tangle' and continuing with I know not what, thanks to the loss of various letters. Google has helped me fill in the gaps: 'Tomorrow's tangle to ye windes resign' – wise words, oh yes – comes from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His version of the Persian verses were published in the 19th century. I wonder who made this arch in Bristol and what inspired them to choose this line of poetry as an adornment?

Le mépris

I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris this week. This 1960s French classic unfolds slowly, but it's beautiful. Set against a backdrop of exploring what cinema is and how to make a film, the crux of the plot is a tragic love story. Although that makes it sound more dramatic than the action turns out to be: in essence, this film depicts the moment two people fall out of love, what happens when the magic has gone. Godard is spot on in his observation and, for that, the film's moving and memorable.

Memory lane

Songs often remind me, as I'm sure they do you, of places and people. This one I haven't heard for about four years, but when I heard it earlier today it took me back straight away to Lyon, where I started this blog. There I lived in a 'module' – that's a flat to you or me; just imagine a flatpack apartment and that's pretty much what it was like, hence the name – with 'Les filles' (three French, one Russian). Our rooms were off a main kitchen and living room, with a blue Ikea 'canapé' (sofa - the Oxford English Dictionary assures me this word actually exists with this meaning in English as well as French) in the corner. Our 'at-home' soundtrack was French radio which has about three recognisable songs amid copious amounts of bland wallpaper pop. Peter von Poehl was one of the ones that stood out:

One song always leads to another. Here's a little taster of Beth Gibbons, who I also heard early on in France after watching L'auberge Espagnole, a bit of a cult 'living abroad' film:

Frankenstein…

… frank-en-tastic!

Updates

• Venue has been saved. Going monthly sounds good to me. Much as I love having all Bristol happenings between two handy covers, there are some parts of the magazine I could happily wave goodbye to. However, I have a suspicion this might just be a prolongation of the agony. Can Venue really survive as a freebie, and shackled to Folio magazine?

• Igor Stravinsky has fallen behind the fireplace in my new house. He can't be extracted. I've tried. And I'm not going to try the bent coathanger tactic, as last time I did that the radiator fell off the wall. Besides, I quite like the idea that he's hiding away there, along with Mozart.

• The globe has been turned the right way up. Curiouser and curiouser… I'm now wondering if my current downstairs neighbour reads this blog? Hello if you do.

In praise of books

'The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.'

Roald Dahl (Matilda)

La bibliotheque

Stravinsky and Mozart

By mistake, I seem to have started a collection of quirky black and white photos of great modernists (don't stop reading). Here's Stravinsky for music, and a while ago I had Picasso to cover art. Both are on my kitchen wall. I need a writer to go with them.

It's a topsy-turvy world…

My downstairs neighbour has put a globe outside his front door. I wonder why it's upside down? It makes it quite hard to read the names of the countries. The occupant of the flat doesn't have an Australian accent, as far as I could detect, so it's probably not out of a patriotic desire to have his home country on top of the world. Perhaps he likes to confound expectations - it's actually a statement of his, erm, quirky, subversive personality. Maybe it broke and he glued it back together, only to discover, after all his efforts, it was the wrong way up? Thoughts on a postcard please.

Ash Wednesday

Pancakes were a must yesterday for Shrove Tuesday. (Why don't we eat them more often? Everyone else does.) Although I'll admit operating a double standard as I haven't given up anything for Lent. Nevertheless I thought I'd mark Ash Wednesday with some lines from one of my favourite poets, TS Eliot. Here's the third part of his Ash Wednesday, published in 1930 and dealing with his recent conversion to Anglicanism.

III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

TS Eliot

Flying high

Spotted: the first hot air balloon of the year. Lazily drifting over a hazy sky early(ish) this morning. Spring must be near.

Decisions, decisions…

Iphigénie en Tauride

A little late blogging about this one, but last week I popped down to the Cinema de Lux in Bristol. That's a pretty rare event in itself: give me the smaller screens, and, admittedly hit and miss, 'arty' films of the Watershed over the popcorn-fuelled audiences and Hollywood blockbusters of Cabot Circus any day. Apart from, I've discovered, a handful of Saturdays this spring when the cavernous spaces and football-pitch sized screens are transformed into surrogate opera houses, in which case, count me in.

The Met Opera House from New York has been broadcasting its productions live to cinemas around the UK for a good while now, but I've been a bit slow on the uptake. Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, starring Plácido Domingo and Susan Graham as the seemingly doomed brother and sister, was my first taste of it. I'll be going back for more.

'Short of fainting I could not have been more moved than when I saw a performance of Gluck’s masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride,' wrote Berlioz. Fainting wasn't on my agenda, but Gluck's piece, written for the Paris Opera, is a gripping tale, which from the outset seems for a tragic ending.

To give you an idea, Iphigénie is obliged to sacrifice any strangers landing on the island of Tauride. Her brother Oreste, who she hasn't seen for 15 years and doesn't recognise, pitches up with a friend after being shipwrecked. You see where this is going… Oh, and the backstory is that their father was murdered by their mother, so Oreste killed their mother in order to avenge his father's death. It's not a cheery tale. Although, without wanting to give the ending away, I will say I wouldn't bother with the deluxe box of kleenex…

Secondhand memories

Bookshop memories from George Orwell, or, why you wouldn't want to open a secondhand bookshop…

Blog log

Over the past year lots of friends have started blogs of all sorts – from photography and sketching to explanations and ponderings . I've also been sent or recommended, not to mention stumbled across, new blogs that I enjoy following. Here they all are in no particular order. The descriptions are by the blog's respective authors. Where none are forthcoming I have improvised. Amendments and additions welcome. Happy reading!

• Adventures in Lomography: 'Steph//// Camera: Diana F+ (and bits and pieces..)///very occasionally, the odd Canon IXUS 50 snap'

• D for Dalrymple: 'D for Dalrymple is written by Christina. Christina is a freelance human who lives in London and is consistently bemused by her tendency to describe herself in the third person.'

• Harmony beat: 'William Harvey's thoughts about cultural diplomacy, including diary entries from his job as Violin and Viola Teacher at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music'

• DrawingaDiagnosis: 'Feeling inspired by all the patients and amazing people I met out in South Africa, I set out to do a drawing a day of things I see in medicine.'

• Amandapondo: How things happen and why they do

• Somewhere Boy: Where a music graduate and librarian writes 'superficial analyses of things I like and regurgitate the opinions of others'

• The inner workings of...: 'I am an Aardman Story man, currently boarding on the next stop-mo feature - The Pirates!'

• Gareth Across States: Life across the pond

• um blogue azul: 'Vários aspectos das suas vidas se associavam à cor azul.' (No, I can't understand Portuguese. Those few lessons when I was in France didn't pay off! But the YouTube videos are good for all.)

• The Age of Uncertainty: 'This is supposed to be a blog about books, but something went wrong..'

• Human Planet: 'On location with this landmark BBC Earth production'

• People reading poems: Erm, exactly what it says on the tin

Just buy a Venue!

I'm completely gutted to hear Bristol's Venue magazine faces closure. If you're reading this anywhere in the city, please go and buy a Venue now! There's no other local magazine that can touch it for comprehensive arts and culture listings, witty and provocative writing and general good humour. That's not to mention the genius of the 'I saw you' and 'I'm sore at you' pages. Help save Venue magazine now and buy a copy!

Eddie Izzard – Learning French

I've just remembered how funny Eddie Izzard is. Enjoy this sketch, otherwise known as The Tale of the Monkey, the Cat and the Mouse…

Time for a new book

I've been in reading heaven since yesterday. I have discovered George Eliot. Victorian novelists are an arena I've only explored in patches: lots of Thomas Hardy, two of the three Brönte sisters, a little Charles Dickens, no Anthonny Trollope. Does a TV adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters count? And George Eliot, shallow though it seems, somehow those volumes always looked so doorstop-like…

The happy coincidence of a friend's recommendation (I was devastated to realise that I'll never have the chance to read Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda again for the first time,' she mused wistfully) and the lucky find of a secondhand bookstall in Greenwich market selling Deronda, plus the capacious minutes on the Bristol-London train, means that the last few hours I've been immersed in the so-deftly observed world of Gwendolen Harleth as conjured by Eliot. Those 700 odd pages have been transformed from doorstop to doorway…

The Secret in their Eyes

The Oscar-winning film The Secret in their Eyes is both a love story and a thriller, set in the now, then and the yet-to-be. I'm not sure the trailer does its compelling tale justice, which is better, I suppose, than all those trailers that give away the best bits of the film. Anyway, it's a great watch.

Human Planet

City dwellers, listen in. For an eye-opening taste of what life is like around the globe, just how different it can be, watch the BBC's stunning Human Planet series. Home can be many things – a boat in the Pacific, a dizzingly high treehouse, located in lands frozen by snow or dried out by sun. In this clip, one of the 'tree people' pops out for some honey. It's a bit more hair-raising than nipping to the corner shop…

Piano greats

Name your favourite pianist. Tough question, so I named five. They might change tomorrow, but hey, here are snippets of my current top keyboard wizards (in no particular order).

1. Martha Argerich


2. Alfred Brendel


3. Murray Perahia


4. Radu Lupu



5.Glenn Gould



Of course, the likes of Rachmaninov and Richter should be in this list, but there's something about having seen a pianist play live that, for me at least, makes them jump up the list over their long-gone counterparts. (Glenn Gould being the exception here.)

Daffodils

Daffodils are one of my favourite flowers. With their cheerful yellow, white and orange trumpets and stars, they herald the warmth of spring. I don't have any particular hankering to grow them, but, mooching around a fusty antique shop, I spotted a 50-year-old book all about how to cultivate daffodils. I wouldn't have bought it, except for the wonderful first sentence, and ensuing paragraph. Thanks MJ Jefferson-Brown.

To the paintings of Picasso, to orchids, and to daffodils no one can remain apathetic. The first, one may either like or dislike. With orchids one may perhaps feel like the atheist who went to the orchid show and came away convinced of the existence of the Devil. Like the spring they are part of, daffodils receive a universally warm welcome.

Views from the Square

There's a blonde woman with two golden retrievers. Harriet and Willow are their names. I know, because she shouts at them a lot. They, meanwhile, gamble around the grass, snuffling in people's barbecues, sniffing chocolate sauce and ice cream, playing, tugging, tumbling, rolling and cajoling until a lazy sunbather or amused student holds out a piece of charcoal encrusted sausage, which, more gratefully than any human recipient, Harriet, or is it Willow, gobbles up.

Glenn Gould and that Brahms Concerto…

It's not often that conductors feel it necessary to preface their performances with a disclaimer. But that's just what Leonard Bernstein did when conducting Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 1962, with the eccentric genius pianist Glenn Gould as soloist. Above is a taster of the slow, slow, slow tempos Gould chose. I've still got to hunt out a clip of a later section, which in Gould's hands seemed to turn from 19th-century turbulence turns into a 20th-century desolate wasteland.

In the meantime, here's that disclaimer:

Thought for the day

Le lecteur – je veux dire le vrai lecteur – est presque toujours un ami.
(The reader – I mean the real reader – is almost always a friend.)

Marcel Pagnol in La gloire de mon pere

Hungarians and Welsh

Even when you don't speak a language, it's often possible to pick up one or two words when abroad. At the very least, people often affect some sort of accent to indicate effort - who hasn't had a go at a mock Italian accent when ordering some 'bel-la pas-ta' or 'spa-ghet-ti bolo-gne-se'? Granted, tonal languages like Chinese and Japanese are going to prove more of a challenge, but in most European languages, being an English speaker means you should have at least a go at the basics of hallo-ing and goodbye-ing. Except there are a few languages that are guaranteed to flummox even the most dedicated of holiday linguists. Hungarian's one, but there's one even more close to home. Oh yes. Welsh.


Choice facts that I have learned: Welsh has two extra letters in the alphabet. But, sadly for all those Scrabble players, the high-scoring letters of j,k,q,v,x and z are taken out. Even more sadly, there are lots of double letters (which, 'Speak Welsh' helpfully advises are one single letter if you're doing a crossword. ch, dd, ff, ll, ng, ph, rh, th, Apparently it's a gendered language (masculine and feminine, which I hadn't known), and you pronounce everything that you see. Apart from when they're exceptions, which you just have to learn. But how on earth do you pronounce every letter in something as basic as 'I am' - 'Rydw i'?

But is it art? (2)

What would you say if your best friend spent 200,000 francs on a piece of art that looks, to you, like a blank white canvas? (No, he shouts, it's not white. It has pale diagonal stripes on it in pale grey. Besides, it's by a famous artist.) Playwright Yasmina Reza amusingly explores the dynamic of the three friends as they tussle over this expensive artwork. It's on now at the cosy Alma Tavern pub theatre (cosy in size, although the plastic seats are less deserving of this description).

Happy Birthday Alfred Brendel!

Well said

"I think great art has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it. Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."

Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in The Guardian