After my total confusion on the Saturday just gone, what with anticipating the change of time and everything, I thought I'd better start this week with everything straight in my mind...
Next there will be blossom - in the garden
Every time I go into the garden there is more to see. The apple tree is exploding into life, and today I saw the first forget-me-nots in flower. They had self-seeded in the concrete slab close to the compost bin. I nearly trod on them when I went to dump the potato and carrot peelings.
Travellers' Joy
We were out and about today, driving along roads I hadn't visited in more than five years. The verges were bright with leaves and flowers; willow and hawthorn for leaves. As for flowers; yellow celandine, gorse and primroses and the bright white of blackthorn, like a maghesium flare in the sun everywhere.
Where the hedges were still bare Travellers' Joy was draped over and under the branches. Strictly speaking it's the flowers that are called Travellors' Joy, and it was the seed heads, Old Man's Beard, that were decorating the hedges. Or clematis vitalbans if you like.
Music
How about 'Playful Pizzicato' by Benjamin Britten. Bursting with with energy and life, from his 'Simple Symphony'.
I managed to completely confuse myself on Saturday;
It all began to go wrong when I woke up, and thought 'what a lovely sunny start to Mothering Sunday'. I had a bit of a lie-in (because it was Mothering Sunday) and the slowly got dressed and made breakfast. As usual I read the news and some blogs on my phone, updated my current 'virtual hike' along the Jurrasic Coast
I love the views along the route, 'standing' at the top of cliffs and basking in the summer sun. I add my step count to the app every day at it moves my little marker along the path.
Then the moment arrived; I looked at the click on the bookshelf; 9am, the same as my phone, so BB must have already changed it. But, but, but, my watch also showed 9am. How could this be? Surely I hadn't changed it in my sleep?
My mother used to go downstairs and make herself toast and jam in the middle of the night in her sleep. It would only be when she saw the evidence the next morning; a plate and knife, and crumbs, the jam and the butter dish left out, that she would realise what she had done. (Unhelpful if you were trying to lose weight).
BB explained all; being only SATURDAY the clocks hadn't changed. I felt a bit disorganised all day.
The monthly tree pictures
The Great Oakat the bottom of the garden
And, taken an hour later, the little apple tree beside it.
It is just coming into leaf.
Music
A lovely little piano piece by Dvorak called Silhouette in A major, full of sunshine and spring.
This is an extract from an article in 'Seen&Unseen', a free online magazine I signed up for. I read it over breakfast today;
..."When I look at the world, I feel like we’re in a football match with no referee. I keep shouting foul and looking for someone to blow the whistle. It feels like the Tower of Babel. Even the technologies we thought would unify us have made us incomprehensible to one another.
... We don’t need any more opinions. We certainly don’t need any more people with misplaced certainty they have the answer...
...To be honest, I’ve just run out of ideas. I’m confused, baffled, clueless. But what embarrasses me most is not my helplessness, it’s my hope. For some reason, in jarring contrast to the circumstances, I can’t shake off the sense that ultimately all this will make sense, that breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.
We’re in the unbearable part of the story where everything goes wrong, but if we put the book down now, we’ll think that was the end of it, when it was really just the set up..."
He goes on, using the story of the jazz pianist Keith Garrett at the now legendary1 Köln Concert 50 years ago, and the Bible story of Job, to explain why he has this hope, and how it sustains him in this scary and uncertain world we find ourselves in.
I do commend this article to you; it's a longish read, but worth the time.
Music
A random extract from the Köln Concert recording, obviously!
Neither of us had much energy today. I taught a chatty piano lesson in the morning; this student is also a good friend so we always have a good time. But apart from that I did very little.
Sewing
I have made quite a lot of progress doing the last bit of this month's stitching on the Collaboration Cover Story. I'm hoping to post it before the end of the month; oh, hang on, that's Monday! Ang has already posted hers to me and it should drop through the letterbox box in the next day or so.
Gardening
Yesterday's Lent reflection email referred to this poem;
Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The series is following the book 'Mister God this is Anna' by Flynn, and we've reached the passage where Anna starts getting interested in growing wild flowers, collecting seeds and sowing them in the dusty yard of the East end of London where she lives.
The garden is bursting with spring flowers now, everywhere I look. I should be out there sowing vegetable seeds and planting out my potatoes, and I will be very soon. We've had some busy weeks though, and I'm not chivvying myself at the moment.
Music
This is such a well-known piece, Aquarium from the Carnival of the Animals, and pretty much describes how I am today.
"This term, dating from the mid-1800s, alludes to the heavy charge of powder or lead that hunters use for large animals like a bear" from the internet
We've used the phrase for years in our household to mean "ready and prepared for every eventuality"
as when I was a peripatetic primary school class instrumental music teacher, and used to load up my car with a selection from
a djembe and a repinique drum (and sometimes my whole 'junk' samba drum kit)
a B flat and a C clarinet, sometimes a trumpet as well (we had a boy in a clarinet class who was born with an extremely short left arm so I got him a cornet and had to learn the basics of playing a trumpet in a great hurry)
a ukulele
a guitar
descant and treble recorders, an ocarina and a flute
not forgetting lesson notes and registers, mp3 player (so much easier than the ghetto blaster and cd wallet it replaced!), memory sticks, laptop and small guitar amp to act as a soester with enough oomph to be heard over the sound of infant classes moving to elephant music...
oh, and my handbag and water bottle and lunchbox and mobile phone... and a book to read at lunchtime....
I used teach up to four different instruments to maybe six or more classes per day across West Sussex. No time to be bored in that job! (Except, maybe, in staff meetings?)
There was always a posibility of turning up to teach year 6 samba drumming, to be greeted with 'ah, we forgot to tell you they are on a school trip; now you are here, could you swap lessons and teach the year 4s their ukulele class', or even 'how about teaching the infants'? I always said yes; I expect I should have refused ('not in the contract' or sonething but - why not if I could and that's what they wanted?
I digress; we were armed for bear at bedtime yesterday and a good thing too...
We switched on the apparently ok upstairs oxygen concentrator - and guess what - faults don't just miraculously disappear if the machine IS actually faulty.
The machine did its beeping and cutting out routine just as it had done at 5.15 this morning.
I phoned it in to the 24 hour support number; yes, they would send a technician in the morning and meanwhile I could use the big emergency backup oxygen cylinder overnight. Now, we keep that in the shed at the bottom of the garden...not exactly handy. So we used our own machine that we bought for staying away overnight ('we advise you don't use your privately purchased machine,' says the help desk assistant; I expect that's in her script). And brought up a smaller cylinder. And kept the portable Inogen concentrator nearby for trips to the loo.
Armed for bear.
Garden
In the garden I have big yellow daffodils, big white daffodils, tete-a-tete daffodils, violas, primulas, one anenome, some violets, soldiers-and-sailors, one red camellia flower, the first grape hyacinths and two tulips.
This is a quick scribble, barely larger than the stamp, on a letter I sent to a friend today, done with a four-colour biro!
Music
Tiptoe through the tulips?
I had no idea this song came from 1929!
Or how about Elgar's Wild Bears (aka 'how to send a class of infants completely wild')
Unavailable; carton of Yeo wholemilk (again?) and a white sour dough leaf (again?)
Unexpected tender stem broccoli; every so often one of us doesn't check the picture and description carefully enough;
and we end up with a surprisingly small packet! We could have returned it to the driver, but we weren't at our most brilliant.
Early Alarm
We have a regular early delivery between 7am and 8am which is usually fine.
But this morning we were woken at 5.15am by the alarm on the oxygen nachine in the bedroom. Just one plaintive beep, enough to make us open our eyes. The machine cut out, and restarted... we were both slowly energing from the depths of sleep when it did it again... we sat up and looked at each other... and a third time. It clearly wanted some attention! Luckily we have alternative methods for supplying me with oxygen so we switched the machine off and I used a portable concentrator to get up and dressed and downstairs.
We called the support number, went through the actions ad requested by the person on the help desk, and everything went back to normal.
We have a mains powered concentrator which we bought years ago for going on holiday, and it is all plugged in and ready for action should things not go smoothly tonight.
Early to bed tonight!
Cooking
This is a pan of tomato and vegetable and bacon sauce for pasta which I made properly, that is, chopping up a fresh onion and a fresh red pepper to go in with some bacon lardons and cook together, before adding chopped tomatoes, a mushroom stock cube (a daring new experiment!), herbs, lemon, tomato pureé and a teaspoon of sugar. It will be going in the freezer.
The pan is new; I ordered it for cooking bubble and squeak and other things. It's a decent non-stick pan, and the food sizzles and browns with just a tiny bit of oil or butter and slides right out onto my plate without sticking. Wonderful! I've only had it a couple of days and I love it.
Music
Almost everyone who gets to about grade 4 or 5 piano learns Für Elise and then goes on to play Solfegetio by C P E Bach, one of The Bach's many talented musician sons. Here it is a sweet little harpsichord, the instrument it was composed for
And here's what happens when a jazz piano trio gets hold of it! They are having such fun!
I remember the Jacques Loussier jazz trio playing Bach way back in the - could it be the 1960s?
