the concert season resumes

I might owe Blogger an apology.  Some of last night's difficulties in accessing the site might have been down to my laptop and not their fault at all.  By this morning it was so slow and reluctant to do anything that the Systems Administrator spent the rest of the day installing new anti-virus programmes and anti-malware, and running scans of everything.  The results of the scans were inconclusive, or at least reassuring in that they didn't find any nasties, on the other hand they didn't explain why the laptop was dawdling along like a resentful five year old who didn't want to go for a walk, and insisted on stopping to step in all the puddles while refusing to climb over any of the stiles unaided or walk up hills.  The SA has warned me that as of this evening it is still slow, and tomorrow it might be time to reinstall Chrome, but in the mean time it has let me type this far without bringing up the message that There was an error saving your post, and allowed me to delete the 292 unwanted comments from the Spam box instead of saving them each time I pressed Delete, as it was doing last night.

The music society concert season has started.  We have just had a young quartet playing Beethoven and Haydn plus Webern and Szymanowski.  Poor Webern, he survived the war only to be shot by an American soldier after being caught smoking a cigar during a curfew.  I still find Szymanowski one of those composers whose presence on Radio 3 sends me scurrying to the middlebrow comfort zone of Classic FM, but my friends said they liked the modern pieces better than the older ones, so I kept that thought to myself.  I could happily dawdle away entire afternoons, if not days, listening to Haydn string quartets, preferably with an inexhaustible supply of tea and a packet of biscuits.

After the concert came the AGM, which the Chairman kept admirably brief.  Admirable for two reasons, one being that nobody can honestly enjoy sitting through Annual General Meetings, and the other being that since I'd volunteered to take the minutes I had a vested interest in their being short.  The rules of the music society are that anybody who buys a season ticket, as distinct from individual concert tickets, is a member.  A touchingly large number of people do, including some who don't get their money's worth in terms of the number of concerts they attend, and a surprisingly large number of them stay on to the AGM.  I never went to a society AGM in my life until I volunteered to become Treasurer of the local beekeepers, and had to to the annual meeting because I was presenting the Treasurer's report at it.

The formal proceedings were followed by wine and cheese in the vestry, under the stern eye of the verger, and once again we managed to drop cheese on the carpet, even though this year we'd provided people with plates.  I found a cloth, probably intended to be a dishcloth up to that point, and crawled around scrubbing at the cheese spots, while a friend who had earlier been worrying that she didn't really seem to do anything on the committee did the honours with a dustpan and brush and a sponge, but next year I don't think we should give them stilton.  It's too crumbly.