There is only time for a quick blog post this evening, as I have a beekeepers' committee meeting. The Systems Administrator has gone to Lords, and it would be pretty antisocial to open the laptop and start typing as soon as I got home.
I made soda bread this morning, because I bought a pot of buttermilk about a fortnight ago when I saw it, meaning to make a raisin bread recipe I saw in the Telegraph, then kept not getting round to it because the weather was so nice for gardening and the milk was very long dated. However, even dates that seem ages off come around eventually, and the last day for the buttermilk was today. It's funny looking stuff, like thin curdled yogurt. The recipe was another by Diana Henry, and again I had to open the wretched Windows Explorer because of the Telegraph glitch that means pages on their site sometimes won't open in Chrome. When I finally found the recipe again I discovered that it was supposed to be apple and raisin bread, and I didn't have any apples, so it was just raisin. It was nice, but next time I wouldn't add sugar to the dough as she suggests. It's quite sweet enough for my taste with the fruit.
After the bread I pottered around the garden gently. I am still teetering on the brink of a cold, and desperately want not to topple over the edge before Friday. We have tickets for Christy Moore at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday night, which I booked over a year ago, as soon as I saw that he was appearing there. Christy Moore has been one of my musical heroes since my early teens, when I was hooked on Planxty, and his gigs with Declan Sinnott are supposed to be quite something. I had a horrible twinge of anxiety a couple of days ago when I found an email from the Southbank Centre in my inbox headed up Christy Moore concert, in case it was cancelled. He hasn't been in great health in recent years, but all the email said was that the concert would start at eight and not the 7.30 pm printed on the tickets.
He released an album called Listen in 2009 that got a great deal of attention on BBC radio, and he told a great story in an interview, of how as a young man he'd had a load of albums confiscated by the Garda, because they contained seditious material, then twenty years on one of the policemen concerned popped up at a gig, still with a copy of the album, asking Christy Moore if he would autograph it. Listen is a very fine album, and includes a good acoustic version of Shine on You Crazy Diamond. It's a test of a good song if it still works stripped down to one voice and an acoustic guitar, though I don't suppose that Pink Floyd thought they were writing folk music. The SA's favourite is the Ballad of Ruby Walsh, which we always have to listen to several times around Cheltenham week.
The next album Folk Tale, released in 2011, includes On Morecambe Bay, about the cockle picking tragedy. I couldn't believe it when that didn't get the Radio 2 Best Original Song in the next Folk Awards. Christy Moore is always very quick in interviews to stress that he didn't write the song, and to credit the actual writer. They was robbed. It's lucky to get even one new song that good in a year, with lyrics as clever as anything Elvis Costello wrote in his heyday, that tells a proper story and grabs you from beginning to end.
And that's all. I need to dig the earth out from under my nails, and I must eat my dinner. Which is vegetable stew, with sweet potatoes and red pepper. It is an experiment while the SA is out, and since I shoved it in the simmer oven at lunchtime I hope it has not gone completely to mush.
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