Another Monday

 

The days I have something to talk about* I'm too tired to talk about it.**  Fortunately someone else derailed the Cambridge tonight at South Desuetude so I didn't have to.  Gah.  Colin's got two beginners and some poor wretched wild-eyed being trying to learn the paradigmatic two to plain bob doubles*** so for a good part of the evening I could hide behind rote ringing for learners.  But Colin has gone and made practise longer again so there's time for us upper level crowd COUGH COUGH COUGH† to do something upper level.  Or to crash and burn in the third or fourth lead (of something upper level).

            There have been a couple of off-stage sucker-punches to mental and physical well-being†† this last week so I went in for my voice lesson today a bit dubiously although I had (warily) noticed that my voice hasn't shut down the way it did even as recently as . . . um . . . last week.  Nadia††† said that possibly my body was learning to override my brain on the subject of singing.  Um.  Snork.  Okay.  I'll take whatever encouragement I can get.  Meanwhile . . . Muddlehampton Choir practise begins again Thursday week, that is, a week from this Thursday.  Yaaaay.  I think.  Eeep.  I'm louder than I was last October . . . Eeeep.  When Gordon sent the all-points email around this weekend, asking us to check in whether we were signing up for this tour of duty or not, I wrote back that having missed two concerts in a row and having been out of commission anyway since last October I was feeling a trifle superstitious about saying I was up for both the wedding in April and the summer concert, but he answered encouragingly that he'd once been out two years with throat trouble and not to worry.  Golly.  And he's one of our good singers. 

            I've been trying to get a mild head start on the music for the wedding since all regular choir singers will already know it, beginning with the singing version of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.‡  Here I thought I was going to have to grapple with German at last and . . . we're singing the (hideous) English text.‡‡  And I was going flat all over the landscape today from New Piece-itis and Nadia says, you must learn to bluff.  Relax that top end, smile, declare to yourself that you're going to be fine . . . and you'll find yourself back on pitch.  Oh.  Meanwhile I've been singing Santa Lucia‡‡‡ for light relief and an attempt by the tireless Nadia to get me to loosen up and maybe even go a little cornball, and . . . every now and then, for about a third of a semiquaver if I'm lucky, I almost overcome my iron determination to remain inflexible, unvarying and invariable, and about as interesting to listen to as a plastic recorder.  Nadia says I should take Santa Lucia to Oisin some Friday and see if he can tease me into hamming it up a little. . . . 

* * *

 * Aside from SHAgibbergibbergibbergibbergibberDOWS 

** See previous footnote. 

*** Ie learning to ring inside.  The leap of mind-bending whimper-eliciting leaps in learning method ringing. 

† It's all in your perspective, of course.  When you're still struggling to ring rounds without having to stand your bell every dozen strokes or so to get it back on the stroke everyone else is on the idea of hoping someone else takes out the Cambridge before you do is a bit like the view of someone hoping for pole position in the Kentucky Derby^ by someone sitting on the back of an elderly cross-grained cob who hasn't picked up the canter in years. 

^ There's been a conversation on the forum about UK vs US measurements and some (American) said she'd had to learn not merely miles and yards but furlongs.  Possibly the one single moment of clarity in six years of elementary-school math for me concerned the furlong:  I can do furlongs.  Horse races are in furlongs.  

On my way to my voice lesson today I stopped at Waterstone(')s# to buy birthday presents.  I bought a copy of ALEX IN NUMBERLAND and PROFESSOR STEWART'S CUPBOARD OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES, and then Stewart's TAMING THE INFINITE for me.  And when I went up to the till I had to restrain myself from saying, here, I read these, and I'm going to read this one!  Having been a clunch-head in school sticks.## 

# http://www.thebookseller.com/news/waterstones-reverts-original-logo-drops-apostrophe.html  Usually I'm poker-up-the-bum stiff with outrage at modern laxity and dereliction on the holy subjects of grammar and punctuation but I've got some sympathy here.  They've wrapped it up in spin-speak and I have no idea what their real motive was, but I have an apostrophe in my street address and it makes every web site on the planet nuts.  And most web sites most of the time are festering little ratbags anyway, especially the customer-service pages, and I don't need any superfluous flashpoints.  So I stopped using my apostrophe.  Stuff still gets here (usually).  There is the interesting side effect that charities who send you address labels you didn't ask for and don't want as a way of rousing cheque-writing guilt~ also leave out the apostrophe.  I have retained the apostrophe on my address labels, thank you very much. 

~ Has anyone ever done any follow-up research on this?  Do free address labels stimulate donations?  They sure don't with me.  Even when they have found a random apostrophe and put it in.= 

= Possibly because the name line usually says 'Mrs R Dickinson'.  Omit the McKinley and die.  I have cancelled credit cards for McKinley omission.  Usually you get some whiner on the phone saying that they can't fit 'R McKinley Dickinson' in the available space.  Fine, I say, I'll find someone who can.   Last time I had this conversation when the credit card finally turned up it said 'Mrs R McKinley Dickinson.'  Amazing.  They must have found those extra four spaces under a cabbage leaf.% 

% This may be a stream-of-footnote record. 

## I also bought the Berlitz Japanese (-English/ English-Japanese) dictionary.  Ahem.  I don't suppose any of you out there can recommend a good basic colloquial beginner-Japanese book/Mixed Media Product?  I don't have enough to do.  I also have this pesky half-Japanese character in SHADOWS.  Watashi wa baka desu.  Except I don't think you'd be using polite-form to call yourself stupid.  Baka da, possibly? 

††  Including . . . no, I did not get to the Live at the Met GOTTERDAMMERUNG.  Siiiiiiiiigh.  I'm beginning to think that just the prospect of sitting through six hours of Wagner brings on an ME flare.  Accentuating the positive, I had a very good SHADOWS day on Saturday instead.  At home you can fidget when your bones ache.  They had better be planning on releasing this Ring commercially.  I wonder what Lovefilm's opera catalogue looks like?

            More positive:  after the frelling temperature got down to twenty degrees^ Friday night and I decided I didn't have to wait till it hit the teens to be CRANKY ABOUT IT . . . the last couple of days have been . . . almost February-in-southern-England-like.  Which is to say that hellhounds are out of their Coats of Evil Impediment and Constriction and are very happy.  And I can stop remembering the way real winter does in fact demand that you protect yourself from death.  There were various comments on the forum about this.  Yes.  When you can't just say 'oh well' if you get it wrong and shiver a little.  I may have to lay in a pair of thermal long johns for potential future extremities^^:  cotton tights haven't really been doing the job this last week.  Speaking of things I haven't bothered to replace since my old Maine clobber wore out.

            And the indoor jungle is back outdoors again, I hope slightly before it's all dead of light deprivation.  I haven't had time to finish setting the greenhouse up. 

^ Minus 6.6 Celsius.  I'm not going to leave the .6 off.  Celsius' degrees are too fat anyway.  One wants to be able to agonize over as precise a description of one's misery as possible.    

So are centigrade's.  Apparently there is a difference, if you're a chemistry teacher, but I can't be bothered. 

^^ All puns welcome 

††† Who has a very bad case of Accentuating the Positive 

‡ In the first place I keep getting distracted by singing the famous triplets which are not the singing line.  This also means, if I am singing my own accompaniment, I am pretty well certain to come in on what is the singing line . . . wrong. 

‡‡ Which is not merely clonking Victorian of the most egregious kind but doesn't anything like fit the music.  

‡‡‡ In Italian.  Please.