Monday 15th December - procrastination - organ playing

 The art of doing other slightly useful things that could be perfectly well done later in order to avoid doing the really useful things that need doing now.

But I've nearly run out of slightly useful things to do...

BB has very busy; the corner by the red chair was piled with boxes of papers and photographs retrieved from my father's flat, and the chest under the window equally laden with books and old magazines and - well - stuff! He's carted it all away upstairs somewhere (tra-la-la, I'm not going to look) and  replenished the rechargeable batteries in the candles and switched on the lights in the windows.

Another mini-step towards Christmas...

This is very pleasing; 

Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656): Voluntary (Musica Britannica no. 24) played by Silas Wollston on the 'St Teilo' 'Tudor' organ. From the CD 'In Chains of Gold - the English pre-Restoration verse anthem, volume 3', recorded in September 2023 and to be released on February 28th 2025 on Signum.

Played on the organ at St Jude on the Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb

I see it takes three people to play this! One to work the bellows, and one to watch the music and operate the stops to change the organ sound (on the other side of the bellows-man), and one to actually play the notes. It's such a tiny keyboard; as well as being only a couple of octaves long I'm sure the keys aren't as big front to back as a modern keyboard.

Back in the 1960s I occasionally played the organ on Sundays at my grandmother's church in a tiny village in Northamptonshire, and once, memorably, for the Australian opera singer Joan Carden. She was interested in Family History and had joined a great gathering of the Carden Families in a small village in Cheshire organised by my father (he was hugely involved in tracing the Carden family tree). She sang the Faure Pie Jesu while I quiveringly accompanied her.

Both times I was playing very elderly and poorly maintained 'tracker action' organs, where the keys were directly connected to the organ pipes by complex systems of levers making them stiff and and difficult and uneven to manage. Quite a challenge to keep going, but thankfully the bellows had been electrified. As long as I didn't use too many stops there was enough air to supply the pipes.

There was another Family Gathering several years later, and once again I played the organ for the celebration service in the Parish Church. This was an all-singing, and probably all-dancing too, given half a chance, fully electric job, with lots of indicator lights and a row of buttons just under the keyboard (called presets) where you could catch them with your thumb to change the sound between verses. I can't remember what the last hymn was, all I remember was that I accidentally flicked one of the presets partway through the final verse; the organ lit up like a Christmas Tree and every stop seemed to have been activated. The sound was tremendous, and I was laughing so much I could hardly concentrate, while at the same time so thankful that this had happened right at the end, and not, say, in a verse like 'And though I walk through death's dark vale'. That would have been so embarrassing. Give me a proper piano every time!

Well, this won't buy the baby a new frock, as they used to say (probably in the Miss Read books). Or, in other words, back to getting on with the Really Useful Things that I should be doing NOW!