Balmy weather

Someone commented over lunch today how strange it is that it's so hot, but dark when you get up. Weird.

Living next door to a twiglet

My neighbour Ruby and her dog Skip, have a magnolia tree in their front garden which until yesterday was very big and was very beautiful when in flower and well, it's a tree and trees are good. It is now a twiglet, shorn of all small branches and anything resembling a leaf. The man who did it has additionally carved, 'Jon,' onto a branch. Jon charged her £500 for the vandalism. Ruby's daughter has had the cheque cancelled, fortunately. Jon also offered to weed her garden for £250. Ruby's daughter did it today for free.

I use mine for my swimming things

What happened to your pilgrim bag?

This day last year

I was outside Westminster Abbey to see the Pope and then we went off down Victoria Street to re-claim the streets, via a pub and something to eat.

New year, new music

After doing concerts, my favourite work activity is planning concerts and learning scores. Got a venue and a date. Got an orchestra, just have to learn the music... Youtube is handy for getting some ideas about how things might be done, but I do most of my learning on the train on the way to work. My good string orchestra is learning the Dvorak String Serenade. We've done everything else I can think of and the Tchaikovsky Serenade and Elgar Introduction and Allegro will always be too hard, so it's as many movements as we can manage well, by the end of Nov when we have our big concert, plus the Bartok Rumanian Dances and a piano trio in the middle. Dvorak, btw was a daily Mass-goer.

none vegetarian or fish on Friday

Been filling out the paperwork for a residential trip next February, where I have to give everyone's dietary requirements. I teach in a school where over a third of pupils come from a faith tradition which requires major dietary care. We will be taking lots of food with us. Really. Then you get the no dairy and nut allergy folks. (It's the nut ones that frighten me. Epipen in hand...) Then there's me. None, vegetaian or fish on Friday. I may just eat round the meat. I'm the group leader (how did I get talked into that...?) so what I eat will not be high up the agenda. My Mum has stories of removing ham and bacon from sandwiches in the 60s and one can live on bread and butter alone...

Out of the news

Obviously, I expect to react the opposite way to many news items and I have not been disappointed in that repect recently. What stuck in the thoat about the Dorries thing was the assertion that she wasn't trying to reduce the number of abortions. Even ignoring the destruction of 10% of the UK population since 1967 and that's a statistic worth repeating and if you include the detruction of human embryos in experiments, the % goes up a great deal more, it's strange the usual fiscal analysis doesn't kick in. I wonder how much income tax is being spent on killing people instead of... any number of beneficial things. The other one I found funny (grotesque, what else do they do to woman....?) the other day was the report saying that woman on the Pill remember things differently to those woman who live with the hormones naturally provided to them by their bodies. The press release (typically copied and pasted into the newspaper I read it in,) then contrasted such woman with ones not on the PIll like we are the odd ones out. Woman not taking weird artificial or do they come from pigs or something? hormones remember more detail, apparently. Thanks, I'll stick with my own, personal to me hormones and my own unadulterated memory. What was that again? Nothing like rational scientific research.

Next Friday

I'm looking forward to next Friday when eating fish turns from some weird thing I choose to do (and I know I'm not alone, except, I am usually actually) to something we all have to do. Lends a certain something to the whole thing.

La Rentree

People endlessly ask about when I go back to work, so I did today, it being the first Monday in Sept. My good deed for the day? I flicked a wasp out of the hair of the lady sitting next to me on the train with my book. The bad news was that it landed on the man opposite, who then flicked it onto the floor. An olympic team in the making. London 2012. Just limbering up.

Back to St Cecilia's

Off I went last Sunday on what was planned to be a group of three of us learning with Sr Bernadette and at the last minute, alas, turned into just me. There was another person in the house, so I was not all alone and of course the sisters are extremely hospitable. Anyway, after Vespers and Compline on Sunday and fish and chips, and Terce and Mass on Monday, it was time for ...the lesson. I attempted to write everything I was told onto my Triplex, rendering the page a little busy, so I could photocopy it on my return and send it to my partners in crime. And I got to sing toute seule, me and Sr Bernadette. Mm. I'm still alive. So hard was I trying to sing exactly as she was - though realistically how could I possibly do that? - that I kept breathing at the same time as her and the more I listened, the more I could tell when she was going to breath and then, breathed with her. Oh dear. One thing that we two in the Garth decided was though we were only sharing the place for 24 hours, we felt like we'd been there for ages and also how quickly you get sucked into the monastery timetable. Bong, must dash.

Displacement Activities

My mother conveniently has her birthday right at the beginning of term, so I invite everyone to my house for Sunday lunch the day before I go back to work and then my main concerns become various food items and whether my house is clean and tidy enough and whether her birthday present is OK, not anything that could happen at work. Will the leg of lamb be cooked by the time I've finished torturing the parish with my brand of organ playing?

I'm not expecting any big things to happen at work, but maybe I should doublebluff and worry about what I don't know might happen. (very Donald Rumsfeld.)

When I don't want to clean, I blog. When I don't want to work, I clean.

You see there's a whole ecosystem of displacement activities, beginning with unloading the dishwasher and ending with cleaning the bathroom. In between is making apple crumble and mackerel pate, which I'm going to do now.

I often get up early on Sunday and cook, but tomorrow, there are other jobs.

PS My preparation for the much blogged about Guild Meeting on Oct 1st?

Some baking, methinks. I wonder what I shall make?...Mm

Meantime, to the kitchen.