Am I really a grown-up?

You remember my casual: "I am toying with taking singing lessons." They're now on!

Next Monday in Little Dewchurch (Hereford has many such villages; quite near is Weston Beggard) I shall open my mouth before a stranger and... what? When I was eight imagining myself singing in public constituted a recurrent nightmare. But I'm a grown-up now. I'm not going to lose sphincter control, am I? Be sent home in the company of an older child?

The moment will tell.

One aim is to be able to sing Schubert's lovely song: An Die Musik (Here's to music). CLICK Janet Baker.

Chosen because of its narrowish dynamic range. But I must also get the stresses right. Here's the first line:

Du holde Kunst in wieviel grauen Stunden
(You gracious art, during so many grey hours...)

I don't read music. Here's how I've notated:

Du holde Kooonst # IN # wee>ee # feelgrauen Stunden.

The moment will tell.

Hardline Hope, a novel (9494 words)
Residents who wanted could chain their bikes to steel hoops cemented into concrete at the entrance to the tower block. Few did. The chains had been strong enough but the bikes had been removed bit by bit, leaving two rusty wheels and a mangled frame which had, over the years, virtually transformed themselves into conceptual art. Getting a bike into the lift would have required artful juggling but the problem didn’t arise since the lift had been inoperative for two months.

Lindsay’s bike was light enough not to have been a problem on the stairs but only without the five-kilo bag of potatoes strapped to the carrier. Five kilos because that was what her mother demanded; saving 5 p on a combination of smaller bags.

Weihnachtsmarkt 3. Technoid

In Cologne we stayed in a penthouse - the top floor all to ourselves, reached by a multi-mirrored lift. The ultimate in style, luxury and a soupcon of techno-frustration.

A wall-mounted digital clock hinted at what was to come; showing time, date, temperature and humidity. A whirring noise in our bedroom, eightish in the morning, indicated dawn had arrived and that the blind was automatically rising a foot to prepare us for daylight.

Nothing so old-fashioned as a tap for the bath - more a stepped cascade mid-way along. Initiated by foot-operated levers and prevented from overflowing by photo-electric sensors. Jacuzzi water agitators of course and, when all had flowed away, a few minutes of sighing and hissing that was never explained - perhaps some kind of drying and/or cleaning function.

Even the curtain rail for the shower curtain was sexily circular: shrouding the user in a tube of white.

Occasional Speeder was entranced by the Krups coffee maker; feed it with a sealed pod of fresh grounds and it delivers deliciously rich expresso in less than a minute, start to finish. Both she and I have subsequently bought this device in the UK.

We ate out but had we self-catered we'd have had access to a range of expensive kitchen knives capable of dealing with anything from a roast quail to a half-carcase of beef and handily attached to the wall by a magnet.

The handbowl tap had no turners and worked by hand proximity plus a puzzling button; the plug was not amenable to reason.
 
Outside the apartment the Russians were handing out literature intended to discourage the Germans from having anything to with Brits. This too was not amenable to reason.

NOTE. I am toying with taking singing lessons. Is this foolish optimism at age eighty? I have yet to approach a teacher and must confess I'm apprehensive at how she (most are women in Herefordshire) might react.

Old man goes bonkers

Suddenly I couldn't stand it; last night I bellowed with anger at the TV, contorted by the wilful discrimination.

Beautiful singing in a beautiful building (albeit with acoustics that did nothing for the music) but from a choir which lacked one of the great glories of choral singing. And this despite interspersed religiose readings which harped endlessly about the Son of Man (note that capital letter) and went into almost gynaecological detail about his mother. Recently I've been softening into a passive agnosticism but now my back stiffened; atheism's the only place for men who detest the way other men and smugly masculine institutions still behave as if women had only a biological function in their contracted world.

Not a soprano in sight at the beloved (Ah, the irony!)  King's College carols wing-ding. Of course there never has been and I'd forgotten. VR likes the singing and the tradition otherwise I'd have put on the German Requiem. Later, lobster with Pol Roger champagne shared between us.

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Sonnet: On good logistics

We went in strong and used our rightful power
To scorch their kind from flesh to skeletons,
While they – Good grief! – replied within an hour
And left us victims of a thousand suns.

Mountains we’ll need, an ocean and a plain,
Work on an unimaginable scale.
That planet, there, hints at a greenish stain,
We’ll re-locate; let hopefulness prevail!

But which comes first: rock faces or the sea?
And where are ways to generate new force?
Do rivers carve their own geography,
Or are their mossy banks pre-packed at source?

We’ll need some special expertise, I see
It’s rather more than mere accountancy.

Re-done following Marly's gentle guidance.
.

A word about giving

"And the greatest of these is charity."

Yet regular donations to charity can be distinctly unsatisfying, reminding us only of the myriad other charities we not supporting.
 
VR donates to several serious and obvious charities but also to one that seems less serious. Book Aid sends second-hand books to bookless areas in Africa. Very commendable. But here's the bit that caught VR's eye and heart: these books are non-instructional and non-improving, they must be entertaining, fictional obviously, light-hearted.

Yes, yes, a child dead from malnutrition cannot be reached by an adult reading aloud from Where The Wild Things Are. But switching from Book Aid to UNICEF leaves others dead from malaria. One would need the judgment of Solomon and the pockets of Croesus to get it entirely right. Books are a form  of light and that too is in short supply.

Me? I donate, otherwise I pursue my own selfish aims. Viz:
 
Hardline Hope, a novel (8100 words)
... the (wealthy) farmer, besotted by her remote aristocracy, soldiered on, using Remy Martin to ease him through the bad bits. It was only when cuckoldry became continuous and he started driving his giant John Deere with a hip-flask close to hand that resolution loomed. One grim day, typical of the Fens, the tractor lurched over a dyke, shed its driver and then - vindictively it seemed – ran over him as it plunged into Wabberthwaite Drain... Surrounded by acre after acre of the vegetable fields he owned, Greta’s husband, himself reduced to the status of one of his sprout plants, lay in the county hospital sustained by tubing and pumps while his extended family used the courts to (a) have the pumps turned off, and (b) disinherit his widow on the grounds that she rather than the tractor had precipitated his downfall.

Weihnachtsmarkt 2. Nosh

It's either the Ch. Musar 2003 or 2008 at Beirut
restaurant in Cologne. A noisy, happy evening

A spiritual journey to Cologne? Nah, we were there for fressen, se gaver de or, in English, making pigs of ourselves. Things started off badly en route, in the delightful Belgian town of Leuwen where I cocked up VR's tournedos and my rib-eye steak by carelessly ordering them à point (ie, drained of all life). Oh the shame!

But Beirut, a Lebanese restaurant in Cologne, made up for my booboo. It was packed and we were seated temporarily with the wine list which reminded me why we’d reserved Beirut in the first place. Lebanon is home to Chateau Musar, a great vineyard, and source of a huge dilemma for me: the 2003 (€69) or the 2008 (€55)? My deliberations brought forth the proprietor who chose our meal by ordering a plate of everything on the menu and signalled his approval when I - slightly against my instincts - picked the older wine. The 2003 was magnificent though just about to dive off the edge of a cliff; ordering the 2008 afterwards solved the dilemma and confirmed my instincts.

Am I a lush? An eighty-year-old lush?

We ate meat, tons of it, at Brauhaus Sunner in Walfisch the following evening, where, as mentioned, the star turn was the feisty shouty waitress (left) - super competent, did a good Marlene imitation. Beer, what else?

At La Paix, in Lille (in France) on the way back I ordered blanquette de veau honouring France's greatest culinary tradition - home cooking in a restaurant. An elegantly re-created brasserie which worked.

Just forgot. Starting out we stayed at the Burlington in VR's home town Folkestone in Kent. Ate at the hotel's Bay Tree Grill, where VR's Dad was chef immediately post-WW2. Sentimentalists the lot of us.

VR and Occasional Speeder: Gluhwein mit Rhum

Weihnachtsmarkt 1. People

People not "things".

In France I revel in the linguistic complexity, the need to be specific, the way they provide directions; I respect the French, admire them, am encouraged to compete with them.

But in Germany (we were there for Cologne's Christmas market) I drive away full of affection.

As with the elderly woman in the little tourist train giggling and nodding as she overhears me speculate with VR and Occasional Speeder on a shop called Treff ("It's gotta be from treffen, the verb to meet...").

As with the student at the Chocolate Museum café, seeing me struggle to get out my camera as a Rhine barge goes by, says: "There'll be another soon" and there is. Who grins, but self-deprecatingly, when I ask who'll win the next World Cup: "Germany, but hey..."

PS: We buy our coffee there because of the view; the museum remains a mystery.

As with the fifty-year-old waitress at the Brauhaus Sunner in Wallfisch who squeezes my shoulder and asks "What else can I bring you darleengk?"

As with the guy at the market stall serving us with three potato pancakes (the minimum unit). Told only one of us wants the blob of savoury sauce, has to physically restrain his hand from adding blobs to the other two (It's traditional! you see.) but manages it, after a fearful struggle, because the customer is always right.

As with the fat guy (a rarity in Germany these days) inexpertly playing a game of curling. When I point to a stone chundering on to the wooden walkway and ask riskily: "Zu viele Bier?" (Too much beer?) he laughs uproariously.

Yes the Dom (cathedral) is magnificent, the Rhine enveloping, the market decorations welcoming - but none is human, none talks, none jokes. It’s contact I’m after.

A bit/lot of cheer

HAPPY TIMES! Champagne (that's real champagne - not the sparklers known as cava, prosecco, cremant, sekt, etc.) is cheaper than at any other time in my life.

Why was it so expensive? Not to complicate things: labour-intensive and time-consuming manufacturing procedures.

Was real champagne worth it? Up to you, but the French think so. When, decades ago, some Spanish vineyards sold "Spanish Champagne" the French sued, causing them to desist. Now, if it says "champagne" on the bottle it's been made in eastern France, near the city of Reims, by the traditional method (méthode champenoise).

Let's talk prices. Until fairly recently the lowest going price was about £25 (US: approx $40) a bottle. The big names (Mumm, Pol Roger, Heidsieck, etc) still charge this but may be disposed to deal a bit. What's changed significantly, in the UK at least, is the emergence of smaller, but legitimate, brands going at £10 a pop. (Thanks to Aldi, the German supermarket chain, who led the charge - see pic.)

Is it OK? Who'd ever believe me? But now you can afford to make up your own mind.

Hardline Hope, a novel (6665 words)

(Gayle said) But before that something personal. Your glasses.”

Lindsay sighed. “My glasses. Ah yes.”

“I take it you’ve been asked before.”

“More than once.”

Gayle looked serious. “Do you mind? Do you know what I’m going to say?”

“More or less. I assume you’re as blind as a bat. I assume you wear contacts and hate ‘em. And for two reasons. First because you always know they’re there. Second because you’re ashamed of being a wuss about wearing contacts.”

“I’ll give yew this, Lindsay. You talk straight.”

Note. TD will now be unproductive for a week or so.