Monday 23rd November - Silence?

 That's two days in a row I haven't chalked a word outside the house.

Why?

I don't know - maybe it was too cold, maybe I couldn't think of one, maybe I wasn't in the mood?

I'm reading a book called 'Amazing Grace' by Kathleen Norris, one very short chapter at a time because I don't want to spoil it by reading too fast. She takes words from her childhood experience of church and unpacks them; so far I have read her chapters on eschatology, the antichrist, and, this morning, silence;

Here, she is describing how, when teaching creative writing, she used to let the children make a noise at their desks until she held up her hand, and then they had to be silent, and listen to the silence; 

The nugget is right at the end of this chapter...

'and in a tiny town in North Dakota a little girl offered a gem of spiritual wisdom....' 

I often sign in for an online journaling workshop on Monday mornings. There tend to be a rather long time of chit-chat and reading out people's comments and saying hello and so on before we get down to the writing bit. Today the starting point was silence... synchronicity?

I usually find it difficult to stop and be still, but, for once, today was the day, almost to the point of wanting to sit and listen to the silence more than I wanted to journal about it. A new experience for me.  

Wednesday 11th November - Be Still

 

Be still - for 2 minutes at 11 am, wearing last year's poppies, along with a couple of neighbours up and down the road - different ones to the people who stood outside their doors on Sunday, apart from us.

I don't feel too bad about wearing last year's poppies as I usually end up buying three of four each year to replace the ones I lose in the days before Remembrance Sunday. 

I suppose, in some kind of weird way, this is my generation's 'war', albeit more of a 'home front' sort of thing for most of us. But the healthcare workers and bus drivers and school staff are all very much on a front line, and a deadly front line at that. So many of them have died from coronavirus this year that it felt right to remember them as well as the soldiers and civilians of all nations and all conflicts. 

Two minutes isn't long.

I see I still haven't polished those shoes.

Sunday 27th August - Now, what has been happening?

Let's see - last post was 10th August. I've enough for a score of posts since then - every day, it seems, except today, has been packed full.

So, I'll start with today and work backwards.

Nothing - well, almost nothing has happened. I guess the main event has been high-speed croissants for breakfast - but more of that in yesterday's post which will be coming up next.

I have learned how to crotchet - well, that started last night, after I ripped back the scarf I had been knitting while in Northern Ireland. The scarf was a failure - I was going round and round on circular needles, and when I cast off it rolled itself up into a nasty narrow snake.

I'd always thought of crochet as a Dark Art, and apart from a roundish coaster which I made in the August-of-making-something-every-day a few years back, hadn't really done anything. (I'm not counting the Tunisian Crotchet Blanket Project, which has stalled at the sewing-together phase).

And perhaps late at night, after a glass of wine, and in poor light, was a bad time to start. But, it seems to be going ok for now.

 
The peace and quiet of today has been blissful. I haven't had to talk to anyone (except BB) all day. He's had to sort out next-door's computer, (which was just checking that the neighbour next-door had got the order right for his new machine. He's finally moving off XP, which I gather is Significant.)

But apart from a few pleasantries with the other neighbour on the other side, I've had a day off "peopling". I'm beginning to feel human-ish.

Right. It will have to be new posts for the other days - too, too much for just a single news bulletin.

Friday 9tjh May - photograph - Friday Afternoons

On Friday afternoons I teach the Junior Recorder Ensemble. They are mostly good little players, but we have just started a new piece. It is made more complex by having descant, descant harmony, treble and tenor recorder parts. Eventually the children will reach a consensus on the notes, and Offenbach's Galop and Can-Can will emerge from the shrill shrieking that fills the music room between 12:40 and 1:10.

That is followed by the year 6 samba band. Enough said. It is only lesson three of the term. Plenty of room for improvement yet.

The comes the year 4/5 recorder ensemble. These children have had either 5 terms, or 8 terms, of recorder lessons and some are still fuzzy over reading the first three notes. They were shocked when I told them how many lessons they had received (assuming 10 lessons per term on average, you can do the maths). However most have grasped the basics and so there were some brief moments of tunefulness.

Finally, three groups of year 3 children, now embarking upon their third term of lessons. This lot are all managing to read the first three notes, and we are slowly and noisily, heading towards something that may eventually become Old MacDonald had a Farm.

I stagger home, reeling under the assault of so much sound, to work on a Debussy Arabesque with one piano pupil, and a slow jazz piece with another piano pupil.

That's it for the week.

Don't talk to me. Not yet. My ears have had enough for one day. They need a little time, some sherry, some peace and quiet to recover.

Sunday 30th June - Never Judge a Book by its Cover

But how else do you judge a book?





Admittedly it is hard to judge a Kindle Book by its cover, especially if yours is an early steam-driven model like mine.




Anyway, back on track, I'm adding this book to my wish-list page:

It's by Leaping Hare Press; I'm just writing that down, sorry, typing that in, so that  don't forget and the writer is Adam Ford because I've just noticed that I've clipped the edge of the front cover in the photograph.

This is the second time I've spotted this this book, and it leaped out at me (visually, I mean, not literally, obviously) from the stack because of the cover. I have a passion for wood-cut, black-and-white line style illustrations. Like the edition of The Hobbit that I read as a child.

The content matches the cover - plain, insightful, leaving room for thought and reflection. It's a bit of a biography, and then a whole series of short essays (like a blog???) on ways of finding - well, it does what it says on the cover, Seeking Silence in a Noisy World.

I didn't buy it.
Yet.
I would rather receive it as a present. (Why? I think because it is something of worth, with value.)

 I bought instead a totally unnecessary addition to the pile of "how-to-knit-crochet-sew-yet-another-useless-and-unlikely-craft-item" books. This one promises that they will only take 30 mins each to make. Then I can give the knitted/sewn/glued/stuck/crocheted thingy away, lovingly, to clutter up someone's life and home, as mine has become cluttered.

If I ever get round to making it.

Saturday 14th July - The ticking clock

The "normal" pattern of my teaching schedule requires a certain amount of stamina and organisation, but is achievable because it quickly settles into a pattern. I travel around the county delivering class music lessons often based on a particular instrument under the "Wider Opportunities in Music" programme.

Each lesson will incorporate singing, rhythm and pulse games, listening to music and learning to play the instrument. There will be between twenty and thirty-five children in each class, ranging in age between 7 and 11 years old.

Monday; C clarinets, keyboards, treble recorders.
Tuesday; keyboards and djembes,
Wednesday; djembe, B flat clarinets and a trumpet, more djembes.
Thursday; samba, class music and two groups of recorders,
Friday; samba and four groups of recorders.

Add to the daily list a selection from (depending on what I am teaching in each lesson); guitar, ukulele, laptop, hefty amplifier, maybe some extra percussion instruments, and the car is soon pretty well solidly filled, leaving just the driver seat free.

And don't forget the planning folder, spare clarinet reeds, song books, sheet music, admin letters to hand out, mp3 player, memory stick, mobile phone and packed lunch!

It's no wonder that at some point the organisation gives way and I find that I have scattered my possessions across the length and breadth of the county - my planning folder abandoned at one school, my coat at another, my mobile phone forgotten on the dining room table, my lunch box in a staff room kitchen....

Most evenings I also teach piano for up to three hours. The change from whole class teaching to individual tuition may be easier in terms of "behaviour management" but still requires intense listening and concentration.

So, to sit here, on a Saturday morning, in a quiet, music-free space is a real joy. I can almost feel my ears relaxing as I listen to the gentle ticking of the clock, and the subdued tapping of fingers on computer keys (mine on the lap-top, Best-Beloved on the PC nearby).

Sunday 20th May - What Jesus might have seen



sea ice spirals near Kamchatka

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gavon/33-stunning-photos-of-earth-taken-by-an-astronaut

Do you think Jesus got to see the world from this angle when he ascended into heaven last Thursday (or sometime today - depends which liturgical calendar you are using)? I hope he took the time to look around on his way up, to see what an amazing and beautiful and strange and intriguing world he had created all that time ago.



Scandinavia and Northern Lights

Of course, 2000 years ago, Paris and Scandinavia wouldn't have been lit up with street lights.

snowy fields and river in Canada

and Canada wouldn't have been divided up into millions of square-shaped fields.

I've just snipped a few bits out of a couple of the pictures. The whole sequence is "out of this world". And I'm not joking!

Saturday 12th May - Macho Morris Maids

It's been a Morrissy sort of day today in the town - everywhere you go there is a gentle, rhythmic tinkling noise as troupes of Morris dancers make their way from the square to the other square to the market to The Bear to The Stout House to the square and back to The Bear and to the market and then back to The Stout House. They clump along, pausing to shake out their hankies and and rattle their cudgels complicated patterns to the accompaniment of and assortment of squeeze boxes, penny whistles, fiddles, bodruans, and whatever else seems to make a suitably rustic sound.

While making my own way from the square to the other square to the market to the bank to the post office to the shop which sold me the roasting tin which has prematurely succumbed to rust, my attention was caught by a very different Morris team.

The accompaniment was provided by a man beating a drum, and another man clipping two substantial staves together in a simple, but compelling rhythm. There were no other sounds. Three men, dressed in tattered black, with blackened faces, and black hats decorated with pheasant feathers, stood impassively in a row, while several women, also dressed in black (but maybe less tattered), and also wielding cudgels, danced round them as though they were tracing a labyrinth, or a Celtic knot. dancers and statues had no expression on their faces, apart from a fierce, inward concentration. The whole effect was weirdly mesmerising, as though they were enacting some kind of ancient spell.

I should have taken a photograph - sorry - I was bewitched - spell bound - by the strange sense of powerful and ancient magic at work.

The dance came to an end, the women standing in front of the men, almost as a challenge. The watchers clapped and the dancers left, to be replaced by a team of "normal" Morris men with flowers in their hats, and,  jingling bells and clean white hankies.

Monday 2nd April - Silence

Of course it isn't really silent here in the garden.

For one thing, my fingers are creating a tipperty-tapperty noise on the keyboard. Some kind of chain saw has started up nearby; further away I can hear the continuous drone of a sit-and-ride mower going round and round the big gardens of the big houses on the estate at the back of us, and the steady subdued roar or the traffic on the dual carriage way at the back of the big houses.

My neighbours are clanking around in their kitchen and garage; buckets and mopping and housework and gardening noises.
Over and above and between all these man-made sounds, the birds are adding to the general hubbub and clamour of a suburban garden.

For me, it counts as silence.

My day job (primary school class music teacher) is very noisy.


The gentlest sounds are when we are quietly listening to something peaceful - "Aquarium" from Carnival of the Animals, or "Intermezzo" from Bizet's Carmen are two of my favourites.

The best loud sounds are the samba band in full, focused flow; surdos and agogo bells belting out the rhythms, tamborims attacking the off-beats with mathematical precision; the mind-force of thirty-five individuals working as one, or maybe the djembe classes - three dozen seven-year olds performing Kuku and layering up the patterns as though their life depended on it.

There are many candidates for the most horrendous noise; beginner descant recorders and beginner clarinets are the ones that vie for first place, but the school hall with six groups of primary school children using the entire contents of the music cupboard to create their own interpretation of "War" is pretty cacophonous in the early stages.

My ears get no peace in the evening; sometimes, my pupils move me to tears by their sensitive, thoughtful, insightful performance - be it at beginner or advanced level. Other times I also feel like crying from frustration and even physical pain as they force their way like a chain saw through the jungle of notes and symbols that get in their way.

Today it is lunchtime, and I have not been required to listen to anything.

For me, this is silence.