2008 — 3 August: Sunday
Tonight's picture shows Christa and another house-guest, Claudia, also back in the Old Windsor, pre-Peter days. Claudia was the daughter of an "honorary" Berlin uncle and aunt (Dieter and Ingeborg) who, as antiques dealers, regularly made shopping trips to the UK during which they invariably took us out to swanky places1 for posh meals and also bought up loads of antique jewellery that Christa would then ship over to them rather than have them travel around with the stuff. That was quite a fun hobby. Claudia (who must now be approaching 50, for gawd's sake) actually went on to become a goldsmith:
Christa and Claudia in Old Windsor, 1976
By the way, Big Bro, I rang dear Mama about six hours ago but she failed to pick up the phone after 12 rings. Whether I was interfering with some TV soap I have no idea. Just thought I'd let you know. G'night at 00:24.
Predominantly cloudy, with occasional showers...
... according to the mellifluous tones of the BBC Radio 3 news and weather chappie at 09:00. So we're going to risk it, in the vicinity of the parish of Tidcombe and Fosbury (wasn't the "Fosbury Flop" a cunning manoeuvre somewhere in Bill Tidy's long-running saga of those clog-dancing maniacs, The Cloggies?) Sounds plausible — I shall have to ask Mrs Google. Good heavens: that shows how little I know about sport. My apologies to Dick Fosbury! I must have been distracted by the strange variations on themes from West Side Story currently being played.
Wayne Marshall is a remarkable English musician whose recordings have already proven him to be a Gershwin pianist of the first order, indeed, his joyous élan and hell-bent-for-leather virtuosity are most reminiscent of Gershwin's own style. Here he is set loose on the spectacular C.B. Fisk organ of the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, in a series of spirited improvisations based on tunes most of which are by Gershwin, with a few other standards thrown in. The results are wildly kinetic and kaleidoscopic.
(Source.)
My Dad was thrown out of his church for playing the devil's music (jazz) on their organ (somewhat before my time, of course).
Incantations...
... and imprecations. I've just (19:45) heard Stuart Maconie sign off the "Freak zone" 15 minutes early by leaving us with Mike Oldfield's Incantations. Actually, I'm only recently returned from the walk and have just put the phone down after hearing Junior's tale of recent woe. He was in the local A&E last Thursday with a high fever and acute tonsillitis (?) and was kept in for observation and fed a pile of medicaments. He's off work still, and I've done the parental "take it easy, drink plenty" advice. I need to take the same advice, I guess, so I shall now nuke a portion of the latest crockpot and sink a welcome cuppa. The walk was quite long, and rather drizzly. It would have been a little easier had we taken2 a map; the car's satnav really isn't much use for little country lanes, let alone foot and bridle paths. But we managed.
Time for food.
While that's preparing itself time to mention a few brief impressions of 1080p hi-def video projected onto a nine foot screen in full Cinemascope. Rather fine! Upscaled material is perfectly acceptable, but native hi-def is beautifully crisp (or will be after final tweaks to the focus and convergence). There's life in the old G70 yet. But the HDFury is doing some strange things to the timing of parts of the converted VGA signal...
What goes around...
At some point prior to September 1994 (and, judging by its original "low" number in my primitive tape cassette labelling system before I transcribed it over to minidisc, the fact that it's recorded with Dolby "B" rather than "C" or "CHx", and the yellowed nature of the original clipping of the programme details from the "Radio Times", quite likely at some point in the mid-1970s) I recorded a one-hour radio documentary programme by Michael Smee about the work of Daphne Oram, one of the pioneering sound engineers who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
It was called "Wee have also sound-houses" which was a quotation Daphne used from a text by Francis Bacon while she was trying to persuade the powers that be of her ideas in the 1950s. Tonight, I note that BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a 45-minute documentary programme called (surprise, surprise) "Wee have also sound-houses" celebrating fifty years of the workshop's output and Daphne's legacy. Guess who'll be listening, and playing "spot the differences"? It starts in just under 3 minutes from now.
So that's the second fabulous programme in two days — yesterday was another piece about stereo pioneer Alan Blumlein.
