Music hath charms............

Music in one form or another has accompanied every part of my life.

I sang as a very small child, and as a nervous teenager, and as an ambitious adult.

Recorded music, (on REAL records), CD's, tapes, on the radio and live in concert halls and opera houses has been the - I nearly said background - framework of my life.

For most of the time it has been a joy, a comfort, sometimes a thrilling experience, occasionally the road to deep sadness.

What some, probably most, people regard as music is something from which I retreat and while recognizing its place in the world will never have a place in my world.

Ask me the name of a recording artist, name a particular recording, enthuse about a well-known performer and we are speaking different languages.

Addicted to TV quiz shows from "pointless" to "University Challenge", I sail happily through questions on classical music from every period, but faced with popular music I sit in glum silence.

Very occasionally something will stir a flicker of memory and I will come up with the right answer while the contestants look bewildered.  Thisis nothing to do with taste, merely that that particular tune song or artist was so popular in my youth that I unwillingly and unwittingly absorbed it into my semi-conscious.

Last evening I watched the 'proms' on BBC2 which consisted of a performance of Mozart works, including the "Requiem".

Despite loving nearly everything he wrote and having sung quite a lot of it, I have somehow never made the acquaintance of this work.

Obviously some bits were familiar but all in all it was strange to me - and I regret to say will remain so,

I know it was the last thing he wrote and that other hands completed the work after his death but that alone cannot account for the fact that it seems to me totally unlike anything else he wrote.

Perhaps it was the fact that the conductor had decided to sprinkle the chorus in amongst the orchestra, but it seemed fragmented and did not hold together as a performance for me.

Maybe my hearing and critical faculties are deteriorating, or maybe the heat and humidity of the last few weeks has got to me, but given a choice my first meeting with this work will be the last.

Or, maybe I am just a crotchety old woman looking for something else to complain about.

Seasons

This morning, for the very first time this season I heard it, the sound I blog about every year as Summer fades, the unmistakable Autumn song of a robin.

Early this year, not sure why but quite different from its Spring and Summer song

There is a melancholy echoing quality about this sound which tugs at the heartstrings.

It was early morning and my windows were open wide so it was not accompanied by a million other birds as it would be later in the day.

This has been a very strange season with extreme heat, sudden plunges to much lower temperatures and a petal-curling, leaf-drying drought.

This morning there was a light shower and it was then the robin sang.

Maybe it was only "good, there will be worms for breakfast", but it sounded like a saraband or other slow mournful tune.

Never a lover of hot weather I hope it will prove to be the signal for temperatures to drop a notch, for soft rain and light breezes to replace what we have had in recent weeks.

Rather a lot to pin on the solitary song of one small bird but it is a bookmark in the days of the year which I have come to rely on.

I am tired of the Olympics (splendid though they have been), fed up with noisy crowds yelling and cheering.  More than a little sick of the smell of charring meat on a thousand barbeques.

Time for a change in the pace of life.

Time for Autumn.

Fully qualified Technophobe

Hello world.  I am still here.

For the past two days I have been unable to access my blog, emails or Google.

Having fiddled with all the weird and wonderful
icons on my screen and having been told I was online when clearly i was not, it has suddenly relented and allowed me access.

For someone like me with no computer skills whatever, no-one to turn to to ask for help and very little idea of what I am doing at the best of times, it seems like a small miracle when something I had almost given up on, miraculously starts to co-operate again.

When the good Lord gave out brains I was out of the room.

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of John's death and having had a miserable lonely trudge to the cemetary with flowers and something to clean up the blue granite headstone, I was feeling in need of  a good energetic blog session, only to find my machine once more refusing to co-operate.

It has been a very sombre time recently with the loss of a member of our drop-in community and other sad events, and the mood in the church has been at a different level from the normal reasonably cheerful one.

I try  not to let these sort of happenings affect my own mood but combined with the fact that my closest friend/neighbour has moved out of the area it has not been easy this time.

There is no choir at St. M's in the month of August so there has not even been that distraction to look forward to and I can feel The Grinch getting nearer.

Roll on Autumn and a change of mood.

Yes of course I know this is only a blip.  Normal (?) service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Fear

This is yet another old story re-visited.

I have my bird seed delivered in large heavy sacks direct into my garage.

They then need to be moved to the shed to fill the plastic bins in which they live until the next refill.

This I do in small quantities at a time since I can't lift heavy weights.

Today I decided to move the remainder of one sack in one go as it was half empty.  In the dim light of the garage I spotted a sudden movement in the sack just as i went to lift it.  A mouse, I thought, so I'll just leave it for a while and go out again in an hour to see if it has been frightened away.

This has worked before.

Gingerly lifting the sack to the garage door I put it down by the door of the shed opened the door and went to lift it in.

Horror of horrors, clinging to the inside of the sack was an immense black spider.  Transfixed with fear I pushed one edge of the sack towards the garden and stepped back-----nothing.

Peering into the sack from a safe distance I saw the monster quite near one edge, so amazed by my own superhuman courage I picked up the sack, marched to the edge of the garden and turned the sack on its side.

The beast slowly crawled out and crept into the greenery, whereupon I seized the sack, hurled its contents into the bin slammed the shed door shut, took the now empty sack into the garage and fled into the house, shaking.

For me a Dan Dare moment, for the rest of the world an exhibition of abject fear.

Gandhi was right, hatred is really fear.

If I hated spiders I'd kill them.  I wouldn't dream of killing them, or indeed anything else, so what I feel is pure unadulterated fear.

Like all fears it is irrational, but knowing that makes no difference to the reaction.

There is a lesson there to be learned.