bona fide celestial music

I made a return visit today to LSO St Luke's for another of their lunchtime solo Bach series.  In a way it would be nice for us country day trippers if concerts on a theme that we like could be spaced out through the year, instead of there being four in as many weeks.  My companion and I couldn't decide which we preferred out of the cello and the harpsichord, and solved the question by going to both, but I'd have been quite happy if today's event had been in two or three weeks, instead of in Chelsea week.  But it wasn't.

My faltering musical brain fails to grasp most of what is going on in the music of JS Bach, but in the end I find it the most perfect music there is, just as TS Eliot is in the end my desert island poet.  I listen to Radio 3 programmes that explain what a fugue is, or how the theme in the second part is the first theme played upside down, and I try hard but I can't hear it.  But today's three preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier felt as large and mysterious as the universe, planets and stars rolling on through vast unimaginable space, while the closing Partita was as lively and complex as the whole life of a human being.  If there were a god and it spoke, it would sound like the music of Bach.

Today's harpsichord recital was by an astonishingly talented and astonishingly young Iranian born musician named Mahan Esfahani.  I hadn't heard of him until this series came up, which says more about me than about him, but I'm sure I'll be hearing more of him and from him in the next few decades.  You can hear him sooner than that, since today's performance will be the Radio 3 lunchtime concert on Thursday 18 October at 1.00pm.  The concert was respectably attended, but by no means a sell-out.  Quite a few of the audience were there by themselves, mostly dressed in casual shirts or T shirts, and significantly more than half of them were men.  I wondered whether some were from the high tech firms that now cluster around Old Street (according to the Telegraph), taking in some abstract musical high culture in their lunch hours.  Pairs of ladies up from the provinces for the day were definitely in the minority.  Maybe Bach's abstract complexities appeal to the male brain, or maybe the fringes of Hoxton are still a bit threatening to some visitors, but it was a very different demographic to the RA Friends' room.

It seemed a terrible waste that music of such high quality was going on with plenty of empty seats in the house, but was an odd echo of Monday night's concert in Colchester with Brendan Power and Tim Edey.  The previous week when it was Spiers and Boden the Systems Administrator and I had to arrive ridiculously long before the main act to get seats, and were beset with silly women who professed not to understand why everybody was sitting down instead of dancing, having talked and giggled their way through half the numbers instead of listening to them.  The gig was a sell out.  For Power and Edey the room was set up with chairs around cafe tables near the stage, and rows of chairs behind with a generous central aisle, a signal that the Arts Centre knew it was nowhere near sold out and wanted to make the room look full.  Brendan Power is a harmonica player of world class, with a polished stage presence and a decent voice, while Tim Edey plays the guitar and the melodeon to a very high standard (though obviously not at the same time) and faster than you would have believed possible.  I'm rather with my dad when he said he did not altogether approve of people playing tunes faster than they were meant to go, just to show off that they could, but it was a jolly good and entertaining gig by two superb musicians at the top of their game, who won a major folk award (Radio 2 Best Duo) only three months ago.  The audience did not talk, or giggle, or try to clap along, but sat listening with the same level of attention that Mahan Esfahani got for JS Bach.  In terms of musicality and technical proficiency you could not squeeze a hair between them and Spiers and Boden, but in marketing terms, the latter have got caught up in the broader media enthusiasm for New Folk and Bellowhead, while Power and Edey are still mostly only known to harmonica enthusiasts (and there aren't very many of those) and hard core folkies who follow Mike Harding on Radio 2.

We wandered up after the concert to the Geffrye Museum, since it was a long time since I'd been there and my friend had never been there at all.  It is a lovely museum, opened in some former almshouses early in the last century partly with the aim of providing instruction and inspiration for the furniture industry that still occupied Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, and it contains room sets with furniture for English homes from Stuart times to the late twentieth century.  It has a charming garden behind, a large and restful expanse of grass and plane trees in front, and a cafe, that served a really good bagel on my last visit and this time round produced a passable scone.  Entry is free.

Then we were able to go home when we wanted to, on a train leaving Liverpool Street at twenty to six, instead of having to wait around for an hour, because the new franchise holder on the Colchester line has scrapped the restriction on the time of homeward travel using a cheap day return.  The quid pro quo is that the fare has risen by over three pounds, on the other hand we spent close to that last time on refreshments to tide us over and buy us a place to sit down while we waited for a train.  Day trippers were not consulted about whether we wanted to make this trade off, but I'd say it was a fair exchange.  It's a pity that after all that the train going home ran late.  I shall look up the timetable presently, and check that it was more than half an hour late, in which case I can put in a claim for 25 per cent of the cost of the ticket.  Oh, and this morning the Circle line was suspended entirely when I got to Liverpool Street, so thank goodness it didn't do that on Tuesday morning when the SA and I were going to Chelsea.

LSO St Lukes and Lucien Freud

Today I went for the first time to LSO St Lukes for a lunchtime concert.  I liked everything about it, and hope it will be the first of a series of regular visits.  St Lukes is an arts venue in what was originally a church (the clue's in the name) half way down Old Street, a short walk from Liverpool Street, or a ride on the number 135 bus.  The church was constructed in the early eighteenth century as part of a church building programme, presumably to provide for London's growing population.  Unfortunately St Lukes was built on soft ground, and suffered from severe subsidence problems from early on in its career.  By the mid twentieth century the roof had been removed for safety reasons, rather than through the action of the Luftwaffe, and it now has a new career with a modern metal frame and roof inside the old Hawksmoor designed walls, as a concert venue.  (Apologies for any material errors in this mini biography of St Lukes.  I read the educational display on the wall of the crypt cafe rather quickly as we were leaving to bag our (unreserved) seats in good time).

As a first time visitor to St Lukes you may find a few things useful to know.  The building doesn't open to the public at all until mid-day on lunchtime concert days, even though the concerts start at 1.00pm, but a very kind and helpful man on the desk of the back entrance told us what time it opened up, and which door the entrance was when it was open, and recommended a cafe that did good coffee where we could wait for half an hour.  The cafe in the crypt does self service hot food, quite tasty, before and after the concerts, and the staff were cheerful.  The staff on the front desk were unruffled by my tale of tickets lost in the post, checked a list and gave me replacement tickets without demur.  The table in front of them held a great many tickets for collection on the door, so that might be the way to do it another time, rather than risk having them posted.  The concert, two Bach solo cello suites by a Dutch cellist I hadn't heard of (though I'd be hard pressed to name many extant cellists beyond Steven Isserlis) was well attended but not a sell-out, so we could have got tickets on the day instead of booking three months in advance.  The Dutch cellist (who is probably well-known to people who actually know about classical music) was delightful (to my ears) and made the suites sound more like dance music than they sometimes do.  The seats in the stalls are on one level in the part of the hall nearer to the stage, and raked in the back half of the auditorium.  Wandering in twenty minutes before the concert started we got seats in the raked part, directly lined up with the central aisle so that we had a superb view.  The acoustics are clean.

There are three more lunchtime Bach concerts, and then other lunchtime concerts in the autumn, and evening things I will probably not go to, though getting back from there would be easier than the south bank, let alone St John's Smith Square.  I went with a friend and we both liked it very much, so it is a useful place to have discovered.

In the afternoon we went to the Lucian Freud portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.  They are only on until May 27th, so that was leaving it late, but we wanted to fit it in with the concert.  It is a large exhibition, which has been comprehensively reviewed by expert critics, leaving me not a lot to add, except to express my sincere personal belief that Lucian Freud was a genius and that it is a superb, wonderful exhibition.  We looked at it for two hours, and then our brains were full.  I don't understand why his pictures are so gripping, and could have done with an art expert to tell me how he did it, but he did.  Several of his subjects are recorded as saying that being painted by Freud was exhausting, as at the end of it you felt sucked dry (apart from having to pose for an enormous number of sittings).  David Hockney sat for Freud for 130 hours, at the end of which Freud had produced a small head (no shoulders, just the head).  When it was Hockney's turn to paint his friend, Freud sat for two and a half hours.  Freud's portraits are as revealing of his subjects as you would expect from a genius, but equally revealing of Freud.  The picture he paints of himself, presented from a downward viewpoint using a floor mounted mirror, two of his children shown doll size tucked in the foreground, apparently oblivious to their father towering behind them, tells you that Lucien Freud lived to paint.  His many children, and wives, and lovers, and friends, were all in the end secondary to the overwhelming fact of his being a painter.  And a genius.

Back at Liverpool Street with three quarters of an hour before the cheap trains, my friend introduced me to the Pontis cafe at the end of the chain of shops above the concourse.  I remember the Pontis name from my City days, when they had some sandwich bars, but had no idea that the Liverpool Street one was so big.  It goes back a tremendous distance, with lots of tables, and so we were able to sit down and drink tea and eat wafer biscuits, which beats standing on the concourse looking at the indicator board and ducking out of people's way.

So all in all it was a good day out.  Tomorrow I am on tour, so there may be a blog posting, depending on whether the Systems Administrator lends me a dongle, and whether I can get it to work, and if not whether I feel lavish enough to spend £5 on wi-fi access at the Grantham Travelodge, and if so can get that to work.  Otherwise news of my travels will have to wait until Saturday, or for the details probably Sunday, since by the time I've driven back from Grantham I might not be feeling very literary.

art in the east end

I went yesterday to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in yet another case of catching something I wanted to see which was going to end soon.  If I made New Year’s resolutions then my one for 2012 ought to have been to get more organised.  I’d promised my uncle that I’d go to my aunt’s lunchtime recital, so I went to Whitechapel via Wesley’s chapel.  The concert started with a piece for cello and piano by a contemporary of Brahms called Albert Dietrich, who used to be famous in his day but has sunk almost without trace.  Unfortunately the concert organiser had omitted to copy the copious notes my uncle had prepared, so the audience left no wiser about Dietrich than they were at the beginning, apart from having heard his Sonata in C major.  Then there was some Faure.  My aunt did not think the Dietrich went so well as it had at the run-through, and my uncle was preoccupied because my aunt was unhappy, and cross that his programme notes had got lost, so the effort I'd made to travel up to town went largely unappreciated by my relations.

I knew that bits of the East End were now very trendy, with prices to match (a far cry from the days when my grandfather grew up there), but I hadn’t seen it for myself, until cutting through from Wesley’s chapel to Whitechapel High Street via the Commercial Road.  Blimey, there are some posh shops and eateries round the back of Spitalfields.  The trendy bits seem to pop up among the unreconstructed areas like currants in a bun, so one minute I was walking past uber-cool clothes shops and delis, and the next minute back in the Tower Hamlets that is the most derived borough in the country.

The Whitechapel Gallery is a lovely art gallery.  I’ve said so before.  It is a very nice, quiet, soothing space.  I feel good just being in the building.  It has the best art gallery café I know.  Lemon polenta cake yesterday, yummy (I love the slight grittiness).  The main draw for me was the third selection of works from the Government Art Collection (I missed part two), this time chosen by Simon Schama.  The Government has managed to acquire an eclectic set of art, and the current offering has everything from a neon installation to a portrait of Admiral Nelson after his victory at the battle of the Nile.  My favourite thing in the room was probably Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman.  Drawn in the style of a Tudor map, from a distance it looks just like the real thing, showing an island with estuaries, mountains, and trees.  There are pictures of little buildings and towns, and the whole thing looks very English, until you read the captions and find that the regions are called Normal, Myth, Posh and Guru, the seas off the coast called Paranoia, Anorexia Nervosa, and Schizophrenia, and the names of the buildings and towns are all states of mind or human behaviours.  It was funny and clever and I’d have liked to buy the poster, but there weren’t any.  Goodness knows if it’s Art, but who cares?

The Government Art Collection exhibition (which only takes up one room, it’s not big) comes with a chunky free booklet, telling you something about Simon Schama’s thought-processes in making his selection, and a bit about each individual work, including where each one is normally hung, a detail that gives an extra layer of interest to the show.  In the Cabinet Office they go in for modern, conceptual pieces (though they do also have Lord Nelson).  A Howard Hodgkin oil painting titled Mud on the Nile normally lives in our ambassador’s residence in Cairo, while the Government Office for the East of England in Cambridge has to make do with a giant colour photograph of allotments in Ely.  It’s great fun. You have until 26 February to see it, then twelve works from number 10 Downing Street, selected by number 10 staff, go on show from 9 March.

The other thing I particularly wanted to catch was a meta-exhibition, a show about a show the Whitechapel did in 1961 of Rothko’s work.  I went to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate a while back and loved it.  I went twice, and if only I’d still been working in the City I’d have gone every week.  Nothing much seems to be happening in those huge canvases, and yet everything is happening.  I could look at them for hours.  There is just one smallish Rothko at the current Whitechapel show, a red and black one, plus photographs of visitors to the original 1961 exhibition, looking grave and absorbed and wearing amazing 1960s hairstyles and spectacles.  There are letters between Rothko and various UK artists and gallery directors discussing the arrangements for that show, a visit Rothko made to the UK, the Tate’s first purchase of a Rothko, and his subsequent gift to them of the Seagram murals.  Rothko was very particular about how his paintings should be hung, at what height from the floor, against what shade of white paint, and how they should be lit, suffuse moderately bright ambient light please and definitely no spot lights.  He rejected the claim by one friend and admirer that his great canvases were like great calm windows in a cathedral, saying that on the contrary they were full of rage and turmoil.  Three months after making his gift to the Tate he killed himself.

There were some other things on as well, but by then I was very tired and not in the mood, so I gave up.  I was able to go straight home instead of hanging around London for another hour and three quarters, because the new railway company on the Colchester line is so far following the example of their predecessor, and lifting the evening restrictions on cheap day travel for half term week.  A friend discovered this wrinkle in the ticketing system a couple of years ago, and it makes a huge difference.  My train home was not full when it left Liverpool Street, and while I see that season ticket holders who have to make the journey every day should get priority for seats during the rush hour, I wish the train company would take a less sweeping view of when the rush hour is.  Normally I can’t get any train home between 4.15pm and 6.44pm.  A quarter past four is too early.  It really limits how much the day-tripper can fit into their trip to town, and most office workers don’t leave their desks for at least another three quarters of an hour after that.  The alternative of hanging around London until quarter to seven can be utterly dismal.  Fine on a sunny summer’s day, when you can sit outside with a book, OK if you are with somebody, miserable on a chilly day in February when you are tired and at the tail end of a cold.

it's going to be a long (cold) day

I’m not going to have time to write a blog entry today, which is why I’m doing it last night.  Today is a working day.  I don’t suppose there’ll be many (any?) customers, as it’s still forecast to be jolly cold, and the roads will be icy, but it’s my weekend to work.  The only thing I can imagine the manager will find for me to do is to tidy away dead leaves and spilled compost in the tunnels, although come to think of it that’s all there’ll have been for my colleagues to do all week.

At the start of February our finishing time moves later, to 5.00pm.  It is light until then, so on a normal day that would make sense.  If we have any customers after 4.00pm today I’d be very surprised.  I’m hoping to negotiate to go home then, even though it is February, as I need to get cleaned up and changed for the supper concert and then drive back to the village hall with the apple crumbles.  It’s probably going to be so cold that the boot of the car won’t get any warmer than a fridge, and I could get away with leaving them in there all day, but I’m nervous about making the experiment.

Goodness knows what they’re going to be like, after an eleven-mile drive to the hall.  I still have bad memories of an apple crumble cooked in a school cookery lesson, taken home on the bus and carried the final mile from the bus stop.  It was pretty soggy by the time we ate it.  Cookery lessons at school were a waste of time anyway, because I’d already done more than that at home, apart from learning how to gut herrings, a skill so revolting I have never again put it into practice, and made sure I wouldn’t need to by marrying a non-fish eater.

I haven’t been to the supper concert before and don’t know what to expect.  At the committee meeting they were talking about tablecloths and flower arrangements, and the timetable of events said the rehearsal was at 6.30pm.  I asked whether this was a musical rehearsal or a catering one, to general hilarity, but honestly I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.  Scurrying about carrying plates of chicken stew to 90 people, I think, which I don’t mind.  I’m glad I volunteered to cook extra pudding and not get involved in the main course.  The scope for accidentally poisoning people with apple crumble is quite limited.  I’m slightly amazed that this kind of community catering hasn’t been banned by now, unless all the volunteer cooks have obtained Level something-or-other Hygiene and Food Handling certificates and submitted their kitchens for official inspection.

I suppose that at the end there’ll be washing up, and then the roads will be icy going home, and it will be horribly late, and then on Sunday morning I’ll have to leap up early to go to work again.  Still, the thaw is forecast to start on Sunday.  Here’s hoping.

fog and brass

Once I drove out into the lanes this morning it turned out to be foggier than I'd realised. thick patches that swelled off the fields.  It stayed that way until mid morning, and at one point I could see moisture droplets forming, not even drizzle falling out of the sky but water condensing out of the air in front of me.  Then suddenly the sun broke through.  I came out of a meeting about the website and a tree planting promotion to tie in with the Queen's Jubilee, and it was a beautiful day, with the sort of sky the word cerulean was invented for.

The owner had the very sensible idea of taking part in the national tree planting campaign for next year's royal Jubilee.  She knows a firm that makes plaques, and we have trees, ties and stakes, so we can offer our customers a package.  It turns out that patriotically celebrating your monarch's sixty years on the throne is a far from spontaneous, joyous action, and that there is a set of official rules and guidelines running to several sheets of A4, covering what commemorative objects are deemed suitable by the Palace, and giving suitable approved phrases to use.  However, it looked as though we could use an off-the-shelf set of words for the plaques (if you want to dedicate a building or suchlike it seems you need to apply for an official permit).

A very cute guide dog puppy in training came into the plant centre, and my colleague and I politely refrained from distracting it, because we both knew you are not supposed to distract working dogs.  It turned out that the puppy had developed a dislike of going out, and we were invited to make a fuss of her as part of the puppy walkers' project to convince her that life outside the reassurance of home was fun.  She was a five and a half month old golden retriever, and they have amazingly soft hair at that age.

I had arranged to leave work half an hour early, so that I could get to the concert in the church.  It seemed a shame to miss the first half when I have a season ticket, and given that I was set to spend the interval pouring out tea and washing cups.  It took ten minutes scrubbing away in the slightly basic facilities of our staffroom to get my hands to a state where anybody sensible would want them near a teacup.  I thought as I signed off my time sheet half an hour early that I hadn't planned this properly.  I should have offered to stay late at some point so that I could take the extra time in lieu this afternoon.  Oh well, I didn't.

This afternoon's concert was by a brass quintet, whose playing was colourful and repertoire not entirely my sort of thing.  They chatted a fair amount between numbers, and the consensus from the other committee meetings was that less chat (there were some fairly weak jokes) would have been welcome.  The brass quintet do a fair bit of work in schools, and I wondered if they were slightly stuck in talking to schoolchildren mode.  The performance of the opening to Handel's Water Music on a collection of watering cans and kettles, while amusing, seemed aimed at the school market.  I did learn something, which is that the tubes in trumpets and trombones are the same diameter most of the way down (trombones logically must be, they slide), whereas in flugelhorns and French horns the tube is flared all the way down.  I never knew that.

The large thorn worked its way out of my knuckle last night, though a small one that I think had been there for ages without causing trouble is now on the move.  It's good that the potential source of infection is gone, though I suppose having started on the antibiotics I have to finish the course for the greater good.  The residual inflammation is spectacular and painful.  Tomorrow's Cardunculus may be a short one, depending on whether by then I am reduced to typing with one hand.

art and music

I went to London today.  Three times in eight days is well above my normal rate of visitation, but my aunt was playing in a concert in St Pancras Church.  I managed to catch the earliest train consistent with getting cheap(er) parking as well as an off-peak return and went first to the National Portrait Gallery, to see their exhibition of photos of Hollywood Stars, Glamour of the Gods.

I like the National Portrait Gallery very much.  Portraiture is a fascinating art (and infinitely preferable to perspex tables with bags of maltesers on them).  I like photography as an end result, while knowing nothing about the process and not being a keen photographer myself.  I can't think when I have ever been to a boring exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  Today's was not boring, though compared to some it left me a little cold, and I'm not sure why that is.  Maybe because most of the stars were from before my time, so their pictures didn't give me that thrill of nostalgia for the films of my youth.  But I like Van Dyck and Gainsborough without it prompting fond memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it can't just be that.  I think it was the glamour that was the problem.  These portraits weren't designed to show the personalities of the stars, or the photographer, so apart from thinking that they were a very good looking bunch of people and that fashions in clothes and makeup had changed a lot since then, you didn't learn anything about them.  Compared to Ida Kar or Hoppe it was all rather superficial.  According to the gallery's publicity blurb it has been a massively successful exhibition, and they were urging people to pre-book tickets, so maybe it was just me.  Though it wasn't especially crowded when I was there.

The concert was of three pieces by British composers born at the turn of the twentieth century.  I'd gone with a certain amount of trepidation, as I struggle with some twentieth century music.  If Martin Simpson sometimes sounds as though he has started playing, and then it turns out he is still tuning up, there are some twentieth century composers that have the opposite effect on me.  I put the radio on, and think the orchestra is still tuning, and then realise that this is it.  Today we got Eric Fogg, who would have been a great composer according to my aunt if he hadn't died when he was only 36, Humphrey Procter-Gregg and Thomas B. Pitfield.  I never heard of any of them, but happily for me they turned out to compose in the English tradition (comparisons with Delius featured in my uncle's programme notes) and were not too discordant and jangly for conservative escaped folk enthusiasts like me.  Humphrey Procter-Gregg only had time to really get stuck into composition in retirement, and he wrote his first cello sonata at the age of 82, three years before he died.  My aunt thought that today's performance was the world premiere.  I hope that he persuaded somebody to play it for him so that he could hear how it sounded in the flesh as well as in his mind's ear, but maybe it had never previously been played in concert, to a bona fide audience drawn from the public as well as family members.  It isn't every day I get to go to a world premiere.  The pianist was a distant relative, my father's cousin's son, which seems to make him my second cousin according to a chart on Wikepedia.  We are of the same generation, and have a great-grandparent in common.  He is a professional musician and can play the piano properly.  Shame that musical gene didn't come down my branch of the family.

rain stopped play

You didn't miss much, not getting a post-match analysis of my day at work yesterday.  I spent most of it stuck on the till (I suppose somebody had to be on the till), and there were rather too many customers who wanted to help, or interfere, depending on your point of view, while I was ringing their items up.  There were several who tried to start putting things back into their trolley, which I had taken out, before I had finished working my way through the rest of their shopping.  If plants already charged for, and which are standing on the counter, find their way back into the trolley before I've finished, this is a recipe for double-charging.  Then there were the 'I've got four of those' brigade, when in fact they had two of those in 1L pots at £3.50 and another two in 9cm pots at £2.95.  Also the 'I've got three of those' variety, when two of the three are right at the other end of the trolley, and when I get to them I am supposed to remember that I've put them through the till already, and not charge for them twice.  And the ones who picked plants up randomly out of the trolley and waved the label helpfully (not) under my nose, when I was trying to go through the whole thing systematically.  And the ones who insisted on telling me they had two of these, four of those and three of the other, when I could see they had mainly 1L pots from the same two suppliers, which were all going to be £3.50, irrespective of species or variety.  Please don't try to help.  By all means refrain from hiding packets of labels under bulky bags of compost and little pots of herbs under big pots of Rodgersia leaves, just don't try to help.  And don't leave piles of plants and large pink plastic trugs in front of the till while you go and choose more things.  People are trying to use that checkout.

The concert in Hadleigh was very good.  The friend who came with me said so too, which was a relief, since it is unfortunate to induce one's friends to waste an evening of their lives and fifteen quid.  She went to music college and understands choral singing and the workings of a baroque orchestra far better than I do, being an escaped folkie and new wave fan who merely knows what they like when it comes to classical music (although as my aunt said to me, who played with the Halle Orchestra in her youth, 'at least you are an audience').

It rained 3mm yesterday evening, better than nothing but still not nearly enough.  Over lunchtime today we have had three sharp showers, one with a little hail mixed in, and one managing to come out of an entirely blue sky.  They are not enough to do the garden any good at all, and just enough to wet the ground and the foliage and so make my gloves and knees soggy and uncomfortable.  (If it were not raining there is no way I would be sitting at my computer at 15.06).

The long-tailed tits seem to have a good breeding season, which is lovely.  The garden is full of them.  They dash around in little flocks, making a frenetic high-pitched squeaking sound.  There are convoys of blackbirds, too, flying solemnly around the garden on what look like test flights.  As I look out of the window now (15.12) there is a preposterously small bluetit on the bird table.  I had to rescue a bird from the conservatory.  It had gone up high, and was banging against the glass, so it never got close to either door.  Our Ginger came to join in, which was not helpful, but the bird eventually crash-landed between two pots on the floor, saw the open door, and dashed into the trees.  I don't know species what it was.  Small and brown with huge eyes.  I guess it was a youngster as for most of the year we don't have any problems with birds in the conservatory, and they have presumably learnt where the door is.  When the robin was nesting in the greenhouse she had mastered the art of flitting out through the louvred vents.

It has now (15.19) stopped raining and I shall get back to the deadheading, weeding and watering.

preview of a day

Back in the 1990s there was a brief craze for Japanese electronic pets called Kamagochi.  They required to have their buttons pushed at regular intervals to 'feed' them and 'play' with them, otherwise they stopped working.  The Far Eastern desk of the place I used to work for back then had one, but found it rather a nuisance, as they couldn't really take it into meetings with stockbrokers and suchlike, and they had to leave it with their desk assistant to tend in their absence.  I believe it died quite quickly.

Having set myself the target of posting something on the blog daily, and writing it on the day, can occassionally have Kamagochi-like qualities.  I'm working today, then going straight from work (clocking off an hour early) to go to a performance of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in St. Mary's Church in Hadleigh.  By the time I get home I don't think I'll have the energy to compose blog posts.  Also it seems a bit mean to my life's companion to get in through the door mid-evening, and rush straight to the keyboard.  Writing some blog posts in advance, that could be quickly pasted in on the day, was suggested, but I think that would lose some of the dynamic quality of response to events.  Also I thought about writing this on Sunday evening, then went and sat in the conservatory with a glass of chilled white wine instead.  The setting sun does show up the smears on the glass.  I was afraid it would.