None so stupid...

Non-Christmassy Christmas news 1. I posted about this moons ago but have neglected my own good advice. Underpants demand a strategy. If you buy a dozen pairs simultaneously (as I foolishly did several years ago), the elastic in all twelve pairs will fail simultaneously. At Cologne’s Christmas market I sensed the failure as my pants ceased to be two-legged and became a pseudo-kilt, hanging down my thighs beneath my trousers.

Sadness followed. After buying a replacement three-pack at Cologne's Primark (super-cheap clothing) I discovered that interim dieting had shrunk me from XXL to XL and the new pants' hold on my waist was uncertain. Strategy! Schmattergy!

Non-Christmassy Christmas news 2. To practice sustained notes I sing the traditional Welsh song: All Through The Night*. Because it's simple and dates back to my childhood I didn't bother with a score and sang from memory.

Sleep, my love, and peace attend thee
All through the night.

Guardian angels God will lend thee
All through the night.

Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,
Hill and vale in slumber steeping,

Love alone its watch is keeping,
All through the night.

The first, second and fourth couplets (in italics) have the same musical structure. The third (bold face) is musically different and higher, but not impossibly so; it presented a difficulty which I've idiotically lived with for months. Days ago I bought the score. Found that "the" in "Soft the" drops a tone and the difficulty disappears. Except for my bruised ass where I've kicked it.

*© Walter Maynard 

Bet it's bad for you

Does any pleasure come without cost?

Sex - think of the risks.
Boozing - prolonged poisoning.
Admiring beauty - flirting with envy.
Learning - filling in an admitted hole.
Passing on skills - showing off.
Creating music - enduring the errors.
Reading - sensing muscles melt.
Watching movies - produced to make money.
Listening to music - the frustration of the inexplicable.
Travel - re-creating that which one's escaping from.
Doing good works - while questioning one's motives.
DIY - a botch that denies others employment.
Sport - the pretence that futile action is important.
Writing poetry - whispering inaudibly to the deaf.
Speaking a foreign language - mostly getting it wrong.
Parenthood - "Sharper than a serpent's tooth..."

I wonder about intentionally wasting time, ie, playing Solitaire. I see it as entering a tranquil state which neither harms me nor anyone else. After all, I'm pretty sure the alternative, in my case, is not improving the world. I may even be marginally more attractive playing Solitaire and thus not talking. But my unproductivity may irritate those who are forced to work.

Preferring to eat imaginative food. A pretty specialised preference. OK provided one doesn't talk about it; even more so, not proselytise.

Science is a great pleasure but possibly because it separates me from the "eng. lit. only" brigade. I can't decide whether being above average height pleases me; perhaps it might if it became: "Not being small".

Sleeping? A nothingness. Can defeatism be OK?

Kubla Khan decreed a pleasure dome but didn't say what a ticket cost.

The New Galvanism

As one gets older habit becomes a comforting shawl. Surprise, on the other hand, can be a draught from an open door.

Habit forces me to watch the 10 pm news, to depend too heavily on semi-colons, to wear only my subfusc shirts, to reject ketchup with hamburgers, to grow my hair long rather than fuss with hairdresser appointments and to re-read thrillers instead of improving novels. Plodding steps towards a Humane Society eulogy (which I’ll probably have to write myself) and one of those basketwork coffins. Half the sparse attendance unable to try the wine “because they’re driving.”

Change, when it happens, comes crabwise. Triggered by an event or situation that is in itself innocuous.

Our cleaning lady is efficient but she bustles, soon after 8 am. Both VR and I retreat to our studies and wait her out while the Dyson roars and the taps splash. Should we retreat further? Outdoors? The idea of deliberately wasting time doesn’t appeal.

Happily our supermarket, Tesco, is part of a giant chain that got things wrong and started to tumble. As the abyss opened change for Tesco was essential. Not before time they chose to revamp our local café where, eighteen years ago, we ate the worst meal of our lives. Nothing radical now, except that food is made to order and nothing is left baking under infra-red bulbs. Many seats are upholstered.

I order a small Americano and a bacon roll, VR a latte and something slightly more adventurous. We talk to each other lazily, politely, about non-controversial subjects that interest us both. The crocks are cleared away and still we hang on, ever so slightly reluctant to move. Can a supermarket become a habit?
 

Whose blues?

STILL NO PIX

Across the road from our rented villa is is a newly built primary school. Very occasionally I hear high-pitched childish voices in rising competition. They sound more contented than I was at primary school, arguably the worst period of my life if I exclude those piercingly unhappy moments when disdainful West Riding maidens turned down my stammered invitations to come to “the pictures”.

The French children are technically “at work” and are no doubt meeting certain obligations. I am on holiday and have no obligations other than to pass time (which sounds better than wasting time). But no one has told my fevered mind which is giving me subterranean gip. Shouldn’t I be visiting cathedrals, wandering the endless forests, decoding the Cathar problem or watching the news in French on telly (Actually impossible. The proprietor of the villa is English and believes like many of her ilk that French telly channels are unnecessary.)?

Improving myself, in fact. Or at the very least inhibiting metal decay.

During the most assiduously organised holiday guilt intrudes. Time is in unrenewable asset, used profligately it brings about a Calvinist hell.

I read a bit but nothing that stretches me. My Kindle - accusingly - contains free downloads of Ovid, Goethe’s autobiography, Milton by the kilo. Untouched.

My almost-namesake, Robert Robinson, was of the opinion that the best holidays are spent at home but that always seemed defeatist. There must be somewhere in the world that needs me, that would profit from my presence. The Athabasca Tar Sands, perhaps. Or Death Valley.

Meanwhile, here’s a poser. Is this post evidence of wasted time? Might I be meeting some form of norm without realising it? Answers in a plainly wrapped email.

Where-e'r you skiCool sales will tempt you inTrees where you...

Shopping is several things, here are three: replacing day-to-day consumables, satisfying an identified, usually one-off, need, and exposing oneself to virtual and/or real-life temptation.

That latter has a bad reputation, the province of those with too much money and time. Unfair! When I read  book reviews or The Gramophone I rarely need a book or CD,  I'm asking to be tempted. Samphire may be a distant concept when I walk through a French street market but then I see it and buy it.

But how about this? In my ski-ing days I often wandered into ski shops with a blank mind. I already owned skis, boots, anorak and salopettes; replacing any cost real money. Was I comforted by "being with" these products? Was I pretending to look for improvements in a leisure industry notorious for selling fashion rather than benefits? I have no idea but I worry even now.

No one enters Tesco with a blank mind, only imperatives: sliced bread (Shock! Horror!), drain cleaner. But recently I saw a world within a world. A mother with a bunch of bananas in her trolley broke one off, peeled it and gave it to her child. An empty skin at check-out.  An imperative had become a temptation and had been satisfied all within a minute: I liked the circularity, far from marketing ploys and advertising strategy.

A fantasy arose. I re-entered the ski-shop, bought skis, boots, etc, donned them, and ski-ed down a car-park now sloping and magically covered with snow. Then I knew...

Think of it as 10 cubed

A thousand posts – so what? Were any of them worth reading? That's what matters. Take this one, for instance.

A thousand pounds a year. In the sixties it was my definition of success. Now it's four months' wine bill.

Hymn
A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

Verse from Oh God Our Help In Ages Past

Hundreds and thousands. Multi-coloured granules for decorating sticky buns. To please the eye rather than the palate. A confectionery fraud.

M. A fairly simple Roman date.

Fahsen'. Cockney utters unimaginably huge figure.

1000 AD. Birth of Adalbert, Duke of Lorraine. To be safe, add "circa".

Grand. Useful addition to the world's vocabulary, courtesy the USA.

K. Slightly less useful addition, courtesy the metric system fans.

1000 cc. A large motorbike engine.

Thousand years. Gives rise to a word many find hard to spell.

Thousand (etym.). OE - püsend, Proto-German - püsundi, plus many more, all equally boring.

Twenty-thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Brownie points if you've read it.

Thousand Foot Krutch. Canadian rock band famous for The End Is Where We Begin. Famous?

Mahler. Symphony No 8. Also known as: Symphony For A XXXXXXXX (Fill in the last word yourself)

A thousand times a thousand times a thousand. The present-day billion debased by the USA. Previously, courtesy the UK, it had twelve zeroes.

** I'm off on a teeny-tiny adventure. I'd be inclined to wish you all the peace of God that passeth all understanding. If it didn't sound uncomfortably like permanent oblivion.

No man can serve two masters

Music is infectious and pernicious.

I listened again to the Wynton Marsalis link at the end of the previous post. Even better fun second time round. In the sidebar I noticed Wynton had done Embraceable You and that set me trawling Charlie Parker’s version which he’d needed a quart of whiskey to complete. Found one but it wasn’t the one.

However I noticed (again in the sidebar) that the late pop singer, Amy Winehouse, had done Tenderly. But that’s a standard, poppers usually avoid standards. Tried that and was moderately impressed by her bluesing her way through the first eight bars accompanied by Jools Holland. But I couldn’t leave it at that and had to listen to Sarah Vaughan who showed how it really should be done.

Listened, too, to Sarah’s Summertime but interrupted her on a sudden impulse to hear that ultimate-quintessence-of-cool version by the Emperor of Cool, Miles Davies. Then I went on to other stuff which I’ve completely forgotten.

I notice I’ve done 30 posts for Tone Deaf, roughly one a day. But it could easily have been 60. With music, I post one sub-subject and a hydra-headed half- dozen springs up immediately. The temptation is enormous since the alternative – writing Blest Redeemer – is like waiting for charity in Times Square. Slow progress. Three thousand words in five weeks. Since I have no plot summary each sentence I write has imaginary links with as-yet-unwritten passages ten-thousand or twenty-thousand words ahead.

Far easier to write a comparison between LvB’s fourth and fifth piano concerti which is, in fact, more or less complete in my head as I type. Oh dear, din-din time.