2010 — 10 January: Sunday
Another midnight. I've been watching this magnificent jazz programme on four amazing albums from 1959. Mind you, of the four I'm only really familiar with the Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue". And I still think I like "Sketches of Spain" even more. Same year, different arranger (Gil Evans).
Time (00:15) for more sleep. G'night.
Cool?
Well, the jazz was, certainly. But this morning (at 08:00) while Neil Sleet tells me the BBC headlines, the porch thermometer tells me it's only -1C at the moment.
A couple of hours later, it's still a resolutely grade A grey day. I gather there's more of the fluffy white stuff to come in the next 48 hours, too. <Sigh> Still, my cold is well on the retreat, and breakfast is awaiting my attention. It's 10:34 and NPR's "Car Talk" is in full flow.
I don't know if the wolves are coming down from the hills, but there are over a dozen seagulls wheeling around overhead on the edge of our little once-green patch. Wonder what they've found so attractive there? I caught up with a week-old copy of the Sunday Times with my breakfast. Could the virulently anti-BBC stance that saturates it have just the slightest bit to do with its ownership, I wonder? Just a thought. I see the TaxPayers' Alliance has also managed to plant propaganda items in it. I think on balance I prefer the (other) Taxpayers' Alliance. "News is what somebody, somewhere, wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."
More music
Hearing "At the Moor's house" (one of Leslie Caron's choices on Private Passions) merely serves to remind me how completely impossible it would have been to play anything from "Petrushka" at Christa's funeral without dissolving me into an even more incoherent puddle! Such beautiful, beautifully moving, music.
Speaking of moving, I've just been out for half an hour or so shifting a light coating of icy stuff off my mostly clear drive just in case I decide to venture further afield. Shelagh from the bungalow opposite assures me that once you get out of the "Gardens" all main/major roads are perfectly OK. "Stay off the minor ones", she says. However, she also reports that the vultures have been busily unstocking the shelves of Waitrose into the capacious maws of their SUVs. I can wait.
A light lunch looms ahead, methinks. It's 13:14 but the threatened snow hasn't quite got here yet, and there are actually puddly bits that used to be solid. The barometer has twitched downward somewhat. The predominant theme for the day remains grey.
Epiphany?
My little kitchen calendar reckons so. "The word made flesh" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) according to the chap who's just started jabbering away after an all-too-short couple of minutes of Lassus polyphony. Time to switch channels, methinks. I shall try husky-voiced Mariella instead. She's chatting to Edmund White. Nice, too, to hear someone mention the excellent book "Perfumes: the guide" — I got my copy, half price, in Borders just over a year ago.
Just displaced two and a half old biscuits and a battered-looking "Penguin" from an airtight kitchen container, replacing them by the slightly healthier pack of dried apricots I bought a week or so back. The "Penguin" had a date of July 2007 on it, but tasted fine with my latest cuppa! The others now rest in the bin. I didn't know they added SO2 to dried apricots to preserve the natural colour of the fruit. Whatever next?
And, as I listened to the programme about Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree I couldn't help but recall an ancient SF short story about a future war being waged to make the world safe for poets and artists. Except that there were none left by the end of the war. My memory tells me it was by Frederik Pohl, but my search for it got sidetracked by a lovely entry about EE "Doc" Smith's daughter, Verna Smith Trestrail, on Pohl's blog:
Verna looked like any pretty, middle-aged — and empty-headed — Hoosier housewife until you found out that she had a towering measured IQ, higher than either my own or Isaac Asimov's. Quite a few of the highest-IQ people I've known (no, not Isaac.1 Or, for that matter, me) have been somewhat quirky or stand-offish, but Verna was as sweet as apple butter. She was also a great cook and, as mentioned, owned a stock of her father the baking and frying chemist's personal recipes. Perhaps formulae would be a better term, because they not only specified what kind of wheat to use and how to grind the flour, but even at what time of year the crop should have been planted. And when Verna made his flapjacks for us, they were worth the trouble.
I wonder if I could ever read Doc Smith's "Lensman" saga again. I first read Triplanetary in 1964.
Distracted slightly as I prepared my evening meal, did I really hear Victoria Coren on "Pick of the Week" saying that her "fear of flying" counsellor cured her, and then was killed in a light aircraft crash? I shall have to "listen again"... I did; she did; "Good god!"
It's 19:55. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Tea? OK.
There's much to ponder here. And here, too.