Clifton Suspension Bridge

 

Allo?

I'm still pondering the phone-answering etiquette for BBC's Who Do You Think You Are programme and magazine. Envisage the scene. Interested reader decides to call up office: 'Ring, ring.' Worker in office picks up: 'Hello, who do you think you are?'

Heard the news?

In the early 1700s, according to Andrew Marr's addictive account of British journalism, newspapers were pretty weird and wonderful, and often to be found skulking in that nebulous area between private and public news. 'Some, for instance, like Ichabod Dawk's News-Letter made a point of leaving some space blank for personal news, which could then be written in and posted on to friends and relatives in the country.' Imagine if one of the free London Tube papers clamouring for commuters' attention carried a blank page for personal news. A new incentive to read one of the discarded papers lining every Tube carriage? Free news, celebrity gossip oh, and if you want to know why the person sitting opposite is not talking to his next-door neighbour, turn to page 15. Or who third-from-the-left is going out with? Heard the latest about Ichabod Dawk's money-making scam? But then I suppose finding out in public someone's personal news is what loud mobile phone conversations on the train are all about.

Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.

In London there's a bit of a divide between people who take the bus and those who take the Tube. Tube fans love to hate the quirks of individual tube lines - the distinctly leisurely attitude of the District Line, the headlong rush of Piccadilly trains, the workman like thrum of the Central line or the downright infuriating ever-decreasing circles of the Circle Line. Complaining about free papers thrust at you from all directions, whilst secretly relishing being drip-fed celebrity gossip, is high on the list of tube activities, especially now that the craze for trying to solve your next-door neighbour's Sudoku as you peer over their shoulder has passed. In Bristol the divide is simpler. Those who are on the bus, and those who are still waiting at the bus stop. Yes, that's right. Bristol buses are not the best in the world, and at £2.10 per single and with a free Metro paper, it's easy to kid yourself that you're in London. After just two weeks of Bristol buses I've clocked up several hours of bus-stop waiting in rain, wind and shine due to buses not turning up, sailing right past expectant passengers, and just being plain late. Though bus activities are rather more sociable. People actually talk to each other on the bus, and even offer a helping hand or piece of advice. And one day, for no reason in particular, the bus home was free. Rant over.

Moving house.

'I'm sorry for the long silence, but you can imagine what desperate packings occupied our lives, what desperate unpackings again to retrieve things prematurely packed, what form-fillings and cupboard emptyings, what rendings of the heart, what rentings of the house, what injections and dejections, what forwardings and backwardings, what helpful briefings, what unhelpful longings, what second thoughts and first impressions.'

Michael Frayn
The Trick of It

Perhaps searching over the past two weeks for somewhere to live wasn't quite as dramatic or traumatic as the experience Michael Frayn puts his characters through, but this short paragraph, or rather long sentence, contains the juxtaposition of practical headaches with emotional heartaches that moving house entails.

Service resumes!

Unintentionally, for the past 18 days I appear to have been on a postal strike. The blogging kind of post, that is. Normal blogging postal service will now resume. Let's hope that the Royal Mail strike doesn't last as long as the Becca's Blog strike.

5/32 Short Films about Glenn Gould - Gould Meets Gould

Glenn Gould. An endlessly intriguing character!

Music and Matilda.

Imagine a girl of four years and three months going into a library and telling the librarian that she would like to read a book. To be more precise, ‘a really good one that grown-ups read. A famous one.’ How do you think the librarian might reply? In Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Mrs Phelps considers picking out ‘a young teenager’s romance’ but, to her surprise, finds herself ‘instinctively walking past that particular shelf’. Instead the ever-optimistic librarian chooses Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations. Four and a quarter year old Matilda enjoys the book, and begins to tackle volumes by other classic authors. Wading her way through a formidable array of books, she comes across Ernest Hemingway: ‘Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Matilda comments. Mrs Phelps reassures her literary protégée, ‘ …don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.’

Seems a pity to waste words. These didn't go into a short interview to celebrate Dahl Day 2007 that I recently did, but I think Mrs Phelps put her finger on the importance of not 'dumbing down'. Being able to approach words and music however you want is one of the best things about both arts.

London

 

Cameo Role

Wigmore Hall, Sunday 9th September 2007. All the Russian greats were there: Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Kissin. Though of course the first three were in musical form, the latter in a rather more tangible incarnation. Kissin played his cameo role to perfection, and who doesn't like a bit of celebrity-in-the-audience spotting? There was also a healthy dollop of Russian superstition. Boris Berezovsky, pianist of the Makhtin/Berezovsky/Kniazev piano trio explained that, just as the repertoire of that night (Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov) was due to be recorded, their record company went 'spectacularly out of business'. So in order to ward off future bad luck, a change of programme was in order. Out with Rachmaninov and in with Tchaikovsky, who according to Berezovsky is 'another Russian composer'.Well said. Bridget Jones would be proud.

Let's make an opera...

I was excited to read that Ian McEwan, of Atonement fame, is writing a libretto for an opera, with music to be composed by Michael Berkeley. From descriptions of music in certain of his books, Ian McEwan's affinity with music is clear: "[the] guitar starts out alone with a languorous two-bar turnaround, a simple descending line from the fifth fret, tumbling into a thick chord which oozes into a second and remains hanging there, an unresolved fading seventh...." (from Saturday). Browsing McEwan's website, I discovered that he had already collaborated with Michael Berkeley, producing an oratorio entitled "Or Shall We Die?".

Soundtrack.

Currently listening to Joshua Bell's album The Romantic Violin (or should that be the romantic violin?) Oh to be a violinist, tugging away at people's heartstrings.