Odd search entries started appearing yesterday. Not unusual to have odd search terms, but they usually contain the word 'parent'. These were for 'american robin peckham'. Identical. And this morning I sussed it. There has been a rare American Robin spotted in Peckham. Yes indeed. In the next door street, possibly at the bottom of our garden, right next door to the fairies. My wife commented a few days ago that there were robins in our garden but those were English ones I think. Now there are bird spotters at the bottom of our garden.
Last night on my way to do the Vivaldi thing there was a great bunch of miscellaneous people all leaning on walls and standing about like a bus queue in search of a bus shelter. Lots of binoculars. I thought they might be looking for the famous Peckham leopards who hit the news a few weeks back. It's like a zoo round here these days, I tell you. I have laughed for years about the "Peckham is the new Islington" thing, and even been thoroughly searched for it. Now it seems Peckham is the new Serengeti and probably the new Wisconsin as well.
But it was robins on their minds. Which is where I come in, sort of. Hello people!
The Vivaldi was a dull second date. All the good stories got used up on the first outing. This time there was no wine - the flattery and inducements are clearly over - and the work was harder. We were properly told off about the 'x' in 'excelsis' and told to pronounce it 'egg shell sis'. This idea had been floated in the comments on the last Vivaldi episode below (Gloria) and I had laughed, dismissing it as a piece of antediluvian obscurantism, probably part of a Jesuit conspiracy and revenge for the Gunpowder Plot. Sadly not. It lives and breathes and is as wild a distortion of words as any found on an official football club website. (I am particularly enjoying Darlington's site at the moment. Tops for sour grapes, independent grammar and spell check unruliness, e.g. 'obliviously' for 'obviously'.)
This week's warm-up tongue twister was "How far is my car?" Way too far, I thought, soberly. My daughter is in the altos and she had primed me for the blockbusting "Tom stops Ron's long songs" but it failed to put in an appearance, much like most of last week's basses. I have no idea what the music is supposed to sound like in its entirety but I have a sense of foreboding. Many years of playing in rock bands has taught me that just because a bunch of people can get something right after six attempts and a lot of coaching does not mean that they will get it right when they only get one attempt, under pressure with no safety net, as it were the executioner presented with a real neck, not a melon. Falling apart in the face of the enemy is not an impossibility. "It'll be all right on the night," quipped one alto mum. "No," I replied. "It'll be over on the night". That's me, the choir's Eeyore already.
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Update.
That robin Mel saw was the one. She said it looked bigger than usual. So what about that then? A national news story quite literally in our back garden.
Comfortable, warm kitchen for rent, with view of garden. £25 per afternoon. Tea and coffee available at near cost price. Bring own binoculars and biscuits.
Just come 6th out of over two billion in a search for 'A'. That's right, one single capital letter. Perhaps I am more influential than I thought.
Not as in Gaynor or Hunniford but as in 'in excelsis deo'. And that's 'deo' as in 'to God', not as in "Daylight come and me wan' go home".
But there was singing involved, for I have rashly volunteered to sing bass in the school choir's rendition of Vivaldi's 'Gloria'. "Why rashly?" I hear you cry. Well, because I haven't done any public choral singing since I was thirteen, and of all the pieces of music I have never heard Vivaldi's Gloria is one of them, right up there alongside 'It's Chico Time'. Sight-singing bass clef in Latin has never been part of my job description. However, life is for learning and I figured I could always pretend to faint if things got really hairy.
So I turned up in the school hall yesterday evening at six thirty and was astonished. Firstly there were numerous other dads milling about, some mums too, but even more extraordinarily there were several bottles of wine standing on a table. Rewards for later? Emergency Communion supplies if the atmosphere got too holy? No indeed, they were for drinking by dads BEFORE the singing. Not exactly Motley Crue I know, but as a dressing room rider it was more than I had dared hope for. I went to it with gusto and immediately poured myself the first of several brimming dentist's swill glasses of the needful.
Much fortified we were hurled into the whole choral experience, the wiggling of heads to loosen our neck muscles and a series of tongue-twisting diction warm-ups. Being the new boy to all this I struggled to keep pace. "Now, at speed!" barked the choir mistress, a formidable lady easily distinguishable from an oil painting, who then proceeded to snap out another series of awkwardly similar syllables. "Three fleas need cheesy trees!" she announced, not expecting to be contradicted. "This dad needs more wine," I thought, though I kept this strictly to myself. "Now..." she continued as if all of this was quite normal and not some nightmare of Dr Seuss on acid. She then proceeded to spit out a further string of devilishly similar short words.
I reviewed my options. Too early for plausible fainting. Wine table too far. So the motion to continue was proposed and resolved, nem con. Rational curiosity returned to me and I realised that there was a deep conceptual flaw in all this ensemble gibberish. You can only say the stuff if you can hear and absorb it first, and one obvious quality of tongue-twisters delivered at speed is that they may also be characterised as ear-knotters. But I was still game for the novelty and so did my best. "Ooh aah eee oowwy, aa aw oow", I sang up and down the scale, skillfully avoiding all consonants, an act of juvenile rebellion which afforded me great comfort at the time. The overall effect was quite pleasing and I could discern no real difference between my efforts and those of my neighbours. I began to feel more confident.
After a brisk stab at the first movement all the dads were whisked off to a side room. We filed down the side of the hall, at a heartbreaking distance from the wine table. Much technical note polishing followed, enlivened by a discussion of whether we were singing school Latin, Italian or choral Latin. We agreed to agree to differ about precisely what language we were pronouncing but to concentrate instead on agreed delivery, a once in a lifetime illustration of hyper-unity, with mature adults usefully agreeing to sing literally the same thing off the same hymn sheet. 'Bonae', pronounced in the classroom as, well, 'bonae' was now to be delivered as 'bonneh'. Every 'magnam' was to become 'man yam'. Briefly I wondered whether man yams might be a useful circumlocution, like lady bumps, but that was probably the Californian Merlot playing tricks with my enquiring mind.
Back to the heavyweight jam. Reunited with the full ensemble we belted out what we had learned. Man yams were joined in the fringes of my imagination by the ho minibus which appeared all through one movement. I think even Fifty Cent would agree that too much hip hop is not good for one's sacred attitude.
Half time came and went in a cloud of tactical discussions. The bloke next door to me was charming and totally confident with the material. Had sung it loads of times. This probably explained the free role he allotted himself, seeing fit to sing any note that took his fancy, whether or not Vivaldi had sanctioned it. I was reminded of a story in which the young 'Just' William embellishes pictures of saints in a book of Church history he had been given for Christmas, ending up well satisfied with his work.
We resumed, refreshed, and at breakneck speed we then hacked our way through the rest of the piece, dwelling not on details but yardage covered. My neighbour remained unencumbered by the music as written and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly. We basses worked hard for each other, and as full time approached I reckoned we had earned the equivalent of a 0-0 draw. And so to bed after one last visit to the wine table - to tidy up, y'know.
One more rehearsal next week to tighten and polish, then the gig itself, next Thursday. Rest assured I will keep you all informed.
Time for some high culture here. It's long overdue and I know it. Blog doth not live by gripe, football, DIY and Molesworth alone. I'm working on it, honest. But unfortunately all I've got today is my visit to the Fuseli exhibition at Tate Britain.
Promises of the weird and wonderful drew me there in the wake of my mother, who felt she needed some high culture too - she's a regular reader, a complimentary enterprise called, perhaps, Listening as a Parent. So Fuseli it was, and it turned out to be not an exhibition of pasta but a load of funny (peculiar) pictures of people who never existed doing things nobody in their right mind would ever get round to doing. Herr Fuseli is alleged to have thought himself the best painter in England. Apparently Blake agreed, but then he was clearly on drugs.
There was something very samey about the way Fuseli painted flesh, and noses, and the way the body parts of his subjects all seemed to be strangers to each other. Someone had also stolen all the red paint off his palette in 1770 and never returned it but he seemed not to have noticed, leaving him with a set of yellowy white flesh tones. He also had a liking for models who had sunken black eyes and noses like beaks, or possibly he just painted them all that way in an attempt to make them look a little more, er, damned or something. My eye was drawn, well yanked actually, to a sumptuous hunk of muscly flesh in one corner, a naked Samson lying in front of a pretty Delilah. Even at twenty paces I knew it was not a Fuseli, and indeed it wasn't, being a work by Rigauld, Frenchman and keen observer of what people actually look like. Well, Samson was a bit steroidal but Delilah looked both alive, non-damned for a villainess and definitely not a bird. Rather pretty actually and I might have cut my hair for her, too.
So anyway, the first two pictures in the show are the best. One was a portrait of Fuseli, not painted by him and not very scary, and the other was The Nightmare, the famous one of the little imp sitting on the studiedly overdressed sleeping woman with fully posable arms. What followed was fun, but not to be taken too seriously. It might just be narrow-mindedness on my part but I've never gone for Gothic creepiness and the infinite world of spooky imaginary doings. Perhaps my distaste results from over exposure to Scooby Doo cartoons, but that's another post. Basically I don't find it scary because it's not real (compare Goya), and it doesn't summon up any real horror within me. And maybe that's because there isn't any dark, lingering horror actually in there (here). Sheltered life, not much guilt, no rage. Perhaps I'm just too dull for this deep stuff. Or maybe it's that the supposedly vast, infinite, trackless forest of nightmares and dark imaginings is really rather little. I've made the same comment about cartoons and heavily processed pop records before. If everything is possible then nothing is interesting; it's narrowness that creates the power to move an audience, the need to concentrate and distill. It's common territory that allows communication, not some private fantasy dressed up as universal truth. If your novel can be ten thousand pages long, with words of your own invention then does it make it more interesting than a two hundred page story about real things in familiar language? If a drummer can have three legs, five arms and perfect timing does that make for more exciting rhythms? If Victoria Beckham can apparently sing a song all the way through in tune and in time does that make...wait, no, that's just silly.
Unslaked by pre-Victorian horror we hot footed and high tailed it across town and dived into the Courtauld Collection in Somerset House. And what a difference. Monet and Renoir, Manet and Degas, Cezanne, Picasso and Braque... now that's what I call painting. We also found out where all the red paint in the world had gone, namely to Vlamminck, who had filled up several walls with it which gave me a mild headache. But it's not really the head that suffers in these sort of expeditions, it's the feet and the lower leg muscles, forced to walk at that slow art gallery speed for hours. Unnatural. They should provide little golf kart things, not audio guides.
So gloomy Gothic United (drops voice) 0, colourful Impressionists-Post Impressionists-Cubist Academicals (raises voice in cheery manner) 6! Fairies 1, Apples 4! Head 1, Feet 2 (match abandoned).
Radio Five have apparently nominated Carlisle United as the country's most thrilling team. Sheesh! You should try supporting them, guys.
I've never done a meme. However, I have been tagged by Paul, who I know to be a pink and breathing person not merely a figment of the ether. My policy has always been to write nothing if nothing occurs but I am prepared to vary that iron rule in this case because it fits in neatly with another recently created rule, which is that I am trying to write posts that take less than a day to construct. So I'm going to do about half of the meme, a sort of me, sticking to the bits that relate to my life and circumstances.
Four jobs I've had:
Radio announcer
Litter collector
Sales Prevention Officer
Composer
Four movies I can watch over and over:
I'm very sensitive to repetition and that sounds like hell to me. It's bad enough listening to music over and over, but that's the only way you can write or construct it..
Four places I’ve lived:
Hampstead
North Cumberland
Oxford
Peckham.
Nice variety there, I think.
Four TV shows I love(d):
Hill Street Blues
Fawlty Towers
The Simpsons
er... (not ER)
oh, Thunderbirds
Four places I've holidayed
Barbados
France
Cyprus
Tamzania
Actually as a jobbing musician I've visited a lot of interesting, semi-holiday destinations. It's a kind of location reversal paralleled in the working musician's perception of leisure time, like weekends and New Year's Eve, time off for everyone else but prime earning time for the providers of jollity.
So I've been to Florida, Jersey, Dubai, India, Brighton, Hollywood, Lord's (cricket ground) and Blackpool, all for the sake of Orpheus. The second trip to Blackpool, in 1989, involved about seventeen hours of continuous motion, the only static bit being actually standing on stage for an hour or so. I arrived back in Islington at about four of a lovely summer's morning, dizzy and disoriented with the roaring of engines in my ears, and I looked out from the balcony of my flat and saw the lovely yellow pink sunshine gradually smear across the sleeping capital. It was quiet, colourful and serenely odd, the end of a whole daysworth of reversals - working when others are playing, travelling when others are still, awake when others are asleep, being paid when others are shelling out, knowing what will happen next while others do not. It was one of those moments when you think "I will never forget this" and I haven't.
Four of my favorite dishes
Chicken Madras
Spaghetti with pesto
Chicken a l'ancienne (cooked in cream and coarse grained mustard)
A proper sherry trifle
Four sites I visit daily:
This is a surprisingly tricky question if you think about it (and thinking about stuff at excessive length is one of my failings) and it goes to the very heart of this thing we call bloggage. I don't visit any four sites daily. The sites I visit most are the slice-of-life personal blogs. The most revealing visiting habit I have, though, is probably my trips to Sitemeter, not compulsive or obsessive but steady. Sitemeter talks to me in a different way. It may seem obvious but blogging is a silent activity for the most part, apart from commenting which is only ever a fraction of one's traffic and not truly representative in many ways. If it were not for Sitemeter I would have no idea who was reading anything I wrote. I can write it but the only continuous critique available to bloggers is the visitor log. I don't write in a spirit of defiance - if nobody read me then I would simply stop - but I don't court volume circulation; this thing we do is free in a number of senses and that, I am assuming, is the spirit in which we can all find something elevating in it. I suppose I'm a sort of toe-dipper blogger - thus far and no further. Find me those who may, enjoy me as they will.
Four places I would rather be right now:
In a cellar in Burgundy
Stateside, accepting yet another Grammy
In a warm summery beer garden in Sussex
At the San Siro watching Carlisle United pick up the Champions' Cup
Four bloggers I'm tagging:
If we all did that then everyone in the world would be tagged within two weeks or less. Now call me a bleeding heart but I don't want to get involved in making people in Bangladesh and Lesotho feel guilty because they haven't got blogs, so if it's all right with everybody I'll pass on that one.
Gah! The Angel of Flu has descended upon the eldest (only) son and has had a bit of a swipe at his dad. My throat has two hot coals at the back and I sound like Jack Nicholson announcing Oscar winners.
Poor Jake. The little mite has spent the weekend in bed, throwing up liberally. At one point he managed to get a lucozade slick across the tiled bathroom floor, a striking dash of colour against the tasteful symphony of pastel blues and lavenders that surrounded it. So feeble was he that not once, not once, did he have the strength or will to lift his Game Boy and join the chase for rare Pokemon, whatever they are. Joie de vivre was replaced by a sort of glum d'existence. Here's hoping he shakes it off soon. We are not an ill family generally, a fact I put down to my freelance status. As if to prove the point I am looking at doing a session this afternoon while at less than one hundred per cent rude health. I will be providing horror noises for a forthcoming episode of Two Pints of Lager ect ect. Although booked on guitar and an Indian instrument called a santur I will offer creepy Jack Nicholson voice-overs as well. Constructive suggestions are always welcomed with the parties concerned so nothing ventured, nothing to lose, nothing to fear except fear itself. Ect ect.
I did have rather more to fear yesterday afternoon as I dangled out of a third floor window, paintbrush in hand, smearing white gloss in the general direction of some nearby glazing bars. I was freezing cold, my legs ached and there seemed to be only a sense of optimism keeping me in place and not in the garden seventy feet below. My life did not flash before me but large parts of my stomach and thighs did as I earnestly hoped the former was not too heavy to carry me down with its bulk and the latter were plump enough not to pass through the small gap left by the lower sash frame as I threw reluctant paint at the unreachable tricky middle section of the woodwork.
Unnerved I re-entered the house and admired the interesting splodge marks I had left on the outside, contemplating ruefully how I would have to repeat much of what I had just endured but this time with a scraper blade in hand. (Note to self: next time hire scaffolding.) My next fatherly task was reading to the poor ill son and co-heir who yet languished in our marital bed - on his mother's side I hasten to point out and under strict instructions to throw up only in her territory. So I read him most of one of the Molesworth books, fished out from our joint library. I probably find the Molesworth oeuvre funnier than he does, mostly because I did once go to a school almost exactly like St Custard's. However it raised a laugh or two from him. They aren't the best or easiest things to read aloud; the misspellings disappear in speech chiz and some of the missing punctuation and said misspellings render them difficult to read fluently without hem hem preparation.
So my throat is sore, my hands are cut, dry and bleeding, my legs ache... hey let's do a show! A comedy show! Suffer, art, whinge, pampered, over privileged, need the money, long hot bath - rearrange these words or my schedule to make any well known phrase, or TV prog, or sensible course of events. Ta.