Even so, Monday lessons are part of the joy, for weekends are periods of contraction. As restaurants fill up and roads get more crowded I remain mewed up, the car in the garage. On Monday the week is reborn and I willingly accept a discipline linked to mankind's greatest achievements. Music may be unneeded diversion but I need it. With music I'm through the veil and into selfishness which nevertheless incorporates a form of altruism. I fancy myself as an instrument, dreaming some day I'll sing a note that will please someone, somewhere. Not just myself.
But a singing tone of voice, peculiar to me, is still elusive. Who should I be as I sing? A light-voiced tenor-ish baritone given to Benjamin Britten's modernities, or a richer voice (V says being "darker" doesn't suit me) singing Schubert's song cycle, Winterreise, with conviction? My upbringing left me with a West Riding speaking voice which lacks nobility. Here's an opportunity to start again.
Hardline Hope, a novel (17,043 words).
Breathing heavily, her heart throbbing, she looked into the loo’s mirror and saw what she had become: face denuded and alarmed, eyes round yet smaller and apparently lashless, lips parted, a portrait of helplessness. A pathetic face capable only of arousing pity. .. The lad had mumbled, reached down to pick up the glasses but she pushed him away and scrabbled for them herself.
In the loo with a lad. Tsk, tsk. That's a trailer that will sell books. So hump-day's over...how did the warbling go?
ReplyDeleteMikeM: Lindsay's a good girl I'll have you know. In this instance she was inefficiently assaulted by a teenager, the aim being to emphasise how losing her glasses changed her outward persona. Specs are important to her and I'm thinking of re-titling the novel Lindsay's Glasses since I was never really persuaded by Hardline Hope.
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