where art collides philosoperontap

The snows had finally melted the day before. We had enjoyed the abnormally wintery winter while it lasted but I think everyone was pleased to see the temperature rise and the roads get back to normal.

When I got out of the car that morning I heard a robin singing. Looking up I could see him on a branch at the top of a bare tree, caroling at the top of his voice. He too was clearly glad the freezing weather had gone.

It was still too early for spring but the sound of the robin filled me with spring-like sensations. The crocuses were out, the rich yellow of their petals the first display of new life in the new year. Other bulbs were now also starting to push through and I was sure it would not be long before daffodils again filled the roadside verges.

I could smell, in my imagination, the freshness of the new season in the back garden and hear the loud cacophony of birdsong, joyful in its celebration from within the newly clothed hedgerows. There was energy there, as if the electricity had been switched on again after a long winter spent in the dark. I raised my face to the sun and soaked it in.

All that though was still to come as the robin sang out its hymn. Still, it raised my spirits and I walked through the front door of the office that day with a spring in my step.

This has been a wonderful winter. I can’t remember when we last had such a sustained period of cold weather. The snow is now falling and this time it looks as if we might get a reasonable dump of it rather than the light scattering that normally comes and goes within a few hours. Ironically the kids are off sledging at Xscape which is an indoor ski slope.

The sky feels as if it is closing in on us though it isn’t getting darker. Occasionally I see someone walking along the pavement the other side of the hedge in the front garden. Give it a couple more hours and there will be hardly anyone. Also cars are still going past.

Sat here in front of the fire I’m facing a near perfect Sunday afternoon.  Anne is doing some baking in the kitchen and in a short while I’ll be cooking a Delia Smith’s recipe chille con carne. Pretty much the same as most other chilles I imagine.

This weather provides an absolutely perfect excuse to sit down and write. To some amongst us tapping away at the PC probably constitutes idleness but they have to believe this is not the case. In fact it is absolutely essential to have uninterrupted time at it.

This the weather you always deam about that gets you stranded in a pub or a country hotel.  Unable to make it home for a whole week, running up a huge bar tab and dreading the moment that the snowplough makes it through to announce that the road is now clear!

The snow has stopped now but it will be back. It strikes me that my recent posts, be they prose or poetry, have very much had a wintery theme. If not winter certainly an element of bleakness. It will be interesting to see how this changes as the year progresses. I’m not naturally a person with a negative outlook.

It’s always an interesting moment seeing the CPO programme list for the next year.There will always be some pieces I like balanced by some I’d rather not have to bother with.This year was no different, and scanning the e-mail I took an involuntarily sharp intake of breath when I saw ‘Tchaikovsky Symphony #5’. What a treat – fantastic.I won’t say which pieces prompted a groan!

Tchaikovsky symphonies are packed full of delights and challenges for your average first violinist (and I am a very average first violinist).  Lovely tunes, fast passages, grunty bits for effect, subtleties that need a great deal of skill and refinement, and sections which, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you play because you’re being drowned out by the brass anyway.  They like doing that.

Sitting waiting to start playing there won’t be much going through my mind, but the sense of anticipation will be powerful, boosted by doubts about all the personal little tricky corners which, in rehearsals, I haven’t quite managed to get to the bottom of.  At least this time we don’t play at the start – I can sit and compose myself a bit more until we join in with the rest of the strings.

Once we get going the audience fades from my consciousness, and it’s just the music.  It sounds clichéd but it’s true.  There is so much to concentrate on that awareness of anything else would be wasteful.  Am I playing exactly with everyone else ?  Are the notes right ?  Am I counting the rests properly?  Will I get that high note right this time?  Am I playing loudly enough – am I playing too loudly? Is my bow going in the right direction?   And they’re just the basic technical details.  Am I managing to deliver what passes for music, let alone Michael’s interpretation of it?  That’s the key question, and the one that time after time, brings us all back for more.

We move through the music, pumping adrenalin just as much in the really quiet bits as in the loud fast sections.  We get to relax and swing with the tunes.  Some sections are more difficult than others and need more focus and wide-eyed, unblinking concentration.  My favourite part ?  The horn solo in the second movement.  From my vantage point in a large section of violins I always think it must be a high-pressure moment for the horn player, and am silently urging him to relax, do his best, and enjoy it.

After all the false summits of the last movement, and past the bit where the brass drowns out the strings, we reach the end flourish.  The baton stops.  A short pause.  Then, we hope, the applause.  The audience’s appreciation is the icing on the cake.  If you’ve enjoyed it half as much as me, you’ll have had a great evening.

The colours at this time of year are wonderfully dark. All variations of black and brown with only the occasional frosty white for a fringe. There is a wan green but it’s limp lack of chlorophyll offers a pitifully muddy contrast with it’s richness at the height of spring. Moreover this insipid, underexposed carpet is only really seen on the verges of roads and in the occasional  pasture, empty of cows.

Green isn’t thought of as a glorious colour but when it is almost absent it doesn’t seem an unreasonable description, thinking back, or ahead to more productive times. The evergreens are dark enough in shadows cast by the low January sun to be almost black.

Normally this is a depressing time but this year the coldness has provided a surprising boost to the system. We rarely see proper winters. Winters with killing temperatures that punish the unwary, the unprepared, the weak. Winters of tradition. There has been little snow but the flat land of the East rarely attracts it.  As usual there is plenty of wind and this year it feels as if the full force of the Siberian Winter has been blowing our way. 

Interestingly there don’t seem to be many takers for the birdseed in the garden. I suppose hibernation must be in full swing, or the birds have already died. My friend the robin is absent. I hope he makes it through the far side. Even the blackbirds, normally reliable, seem to have disappeared. Time will tell. Spring has a way of fixing things.

The beauty of a long hard winter is the contrast it provides with spring when it finally arrives. This year I am not in a hurry. I am content with having to sit in in front of the fire, or to wrap up well when going out. Sunday afternoons spent in the kitchen, spicy vegetable soup with rustic brown bread and butter, crumpets, ginger cake and tea. Then a roast dinner in the evening before settling in for the night.

Friday morning.  I got up earlier than I would have done on a normal weekday, and didn’t mind.  Packing the car up mostly with things that I wouldn’t need, but nevertheless wanted to take, I remembered that I ought to check the oil.  It’s not something that I often do, but the last service was back in March, nine months ago, and I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere at the side of a busy road waiting for assistance.  Assistance, I might add, for which I would have to pay extra, not having renewed my membership last time it lapsed.

It was still dark as I grappled with the bonnet release catch to get at the engine.  Getting the dipstick out was easy; it was getting it back in which was problematic.  After some minutes of trying I headed back into the house to find a torch.  I keep one in the airing cupboard upstairs because it’s always too dark to find anything in there.  There was enough oil.  There always is.  It was time to go.

My leaving-the-house routine is always the same when I go away for more than a day.  It starts upstairs always with the same questions. Are all the windows shut, and are all the taps off ?  The fact that it’s winter and I know the windows haven’t been opened in the first place is irrelevant.  Then there’s the decision about the central heating.  Off or timed.  The downstairs routine involves checking the oven about three times, and wondering whether to leave lights on, to make it look like someone’s in.  This time I decided to switch the central heating and the lights off.  It’s actually the same decision every time, but I still have to make it. 

Before I left the house, I rushed back upstairs to make sure I’d switched the alarm off properly.  I’ve gone off before and left it on snooze.  It makes an awful racket, and I didn’t want to annoy the artists next door.  I closed the font door behind me, locked it, and rattled the handle a couple of times just to check the door really was locked.  It was still dark, so the usual mental chime to clear the fallen leaves from the garden didn’t happen.  It would, though, on my return.  I drove away casting the usual backwards glance to check the padlock on the gates.  Lincoln Christmas Market weekend.  Messiah CD.  Tradition.

Lincoln Christmas Market was fun. At each turn there were interesting stalls full of wonderful goods to buy. Black Yak hats and candle powered steamboats stirred it with Lincoln Red burgers, dodgems and mulled wine. Festive music and flashing lights, mesmerising, mixed in with hot and spicy seasonal smells. The noise of the stallholders competing for attention. Children clutching their helium filled Father Christmas balloons, momentarily appeased. Fingers sticky from sugary doughnuts and lips brown with hot chocolate. The warm glow from sitting in the pub, snug with a pint of beer. A favourite date in the calendar.

The other market was different. It was bitterly cold and it was crowded. Movement was reduced to a shuffle. There was a limited range of attractions for children and some of the old favourites were no longer there. The big wheel was four pounds per person. That’s a pound per revolution. Dad can you buy me this, can you buy me that drowned out the calls of the vendors pushing their wares. I passed a pavement cafe that in the summer we had sat at sipping refreshing drinks. Now it was bitter, windchilled and uninviting.

Home now. Next year I will have forgotten the second Market. Blanked it out. I am programmed only to remember the good.

He was buried on Thursday. The weather wasn’t very good, it being November, but there was a good turnout apparently. They were all there, except the Americans, who couldn’t make the trip. They had had plans, now cast aside clearly, to go to America.

He hadn’t been on the scene long although she had known him all her life. At a time when things had been difficult he had arrived as a knight in shining armour. He had renewed her happiness and offered her hope. But now he was gone.

I only met him the once, at the 50^th wedding anniversary bash. He was a little overshadowed by the noise of the family, the rabble, but he had played his part. That night I wasn’t driving so I had a few beers and I didn’t get much chance to speak with him. I don’t think he was sat close to me.

He fitted in to the stereotype of his generation, as did many of the partygoers that night. The black and white slides evoked memories of my childhood although they weren’t of my side of the family. Quite austere memories really, not of my own childhood but of what I imagined my parents’ to be.

The war had not finished all that long ago and it was only a few years since the end of rationing. Now the funeral made it feel as if those days were back. Black and white again.

So now she will have to start all over again, if she can. It’s a tough old game but it’s amazing how resilient we are. It’s a constant battle though and she will need her family’s help.

As I write I look up and stare into the fire…

It’s one of those horrible wet, miserable days in November where nobody in their right mind is out and about. The fire in the living room is cosy enough but I want to get up and out and do something!

It brings to mind those classic Sunday afternoons from my childhood where all there was to do was watch the black and white film on BBC2 or play Monopoly. Tea was a welcome interval in the boredom. Songs of Praise would come and go and then there was usually something good on the radio. Hello Cheeky springs to mind.

In those days we actually used to look forward to specific slots on the radio such as the early Sunday night comedy. Times have changed and with them the electricity bills have gone up. Hannah is doing her music homework whilst watching something on the internet. Joe is playing with Adobe Flash. John is playing football manager whilst watching an early round FA Cup Tie between Havant and Brentford and gawd only knows what Tom is up to. I only know it won’t be homework.

The only regular slot for us on the radio these days is the Archers, at which point the kitchen empties of all but Anne. We also listen when Tom has his Wake Up To The Weekend show on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

It’s twenty five to four and will be dark soon. I like the early dark nights, especially when the fire is going.

Sundays aren’t really boring anymore. In any case boredom is a state of mind that you can easily overcome if you chose to. John and I just had a bit of a duet session, he on sax and me on guitar. I don’t think it would have won any prizes but that’s ok. I’ve also got the printer working. I don’t think it was broken in the first place but I got it to work so that is good. I’ve printed out some invites for our Christmas Party so I’ll pop out in the rain and deliver some in a bit.

What would they have done in the stone age on a Sunday afternoon. There was even less to do then than in the sixties of my childhood. Of course they probably wouldn’t have realised it was a Sunday which makes the thought all that more interesting. You can imagine them sitting in front of the fire in the cave wondering why that specific day was so boring. No deer to hunt, too wet to go fishing. It’s probably on days like that that they had the idea to paint the cave walls. It was something to do.

Of course the food was probably boring as well. You can imagine the kids complaining. “Not mince again!” I assume they had mince in those days! They wouldn’t have had Monopoly as it wouldn’t have been invented yet. So it was probably charades, the cut down version with no movies or books or TV programmes.

It would be an interesting experiment to cut people off from contact with the rest of humanity without clocks or calendars, just to see if they could tell which day was a Sunday by virtue of it being more boring than the others. They could turn it into a reality TV program, although it would probably be a bit boring to watch!

Right I’m off out.

It was a dark day in November or early December 1983. I remember it was a Sunday and I was down to my last pound. Some of it went on potatoes, baked beans and cardboard flavoured burgers from the local SPAR. The remaining fifty pence went in the electricity meter to cook the food. Then I sat on the settee in my sleeping bag in front of the TV until the meter ran out.

Next morning I stayed in bed under the blankets and sleeping bag, nose sticking out blowing frosty breath. No heating, no money to switch it on.

It felt dramatic but it wasn’t really. I hadn’t made any effort to find a job but it wouldn’t be a problem when I came to it. I had a big sense of freedom. No ties. I could do anything I liked when I liked, as long as it didn’t take money.

In the run up to Christmas I came under increasing pressure from my parents to get a job. I suspect that that dark Sunday made up my mind. Reluctantly, I relented, and got myself employment with Marconi in Lincoln starting in January. I never considered it would ever be a problem. It’s all about attitude.

I hired a van and moved all my worldly goods to Lincoln. Driving away I was leaving a phase of my life behind.

It’s strange to think that it is now 2008 and 25 years since I left. Since then I have pretty much always had a mortgage and have never repeated the feeling of freedom. Deep down I am not a responsible individual, I’m only a big kid, so not having that freedom doesn’t feel right.

It’s early. I couldn’t sleep so I’m up and sitting on the settee in the living room. The blanket that lives on the settee is covering my legs because it is cold. We are into the last week of October and it definately feels like the first week of winter. The weather forecast for today is wet with a maximum temperature of 7 oC, minimum -1oC.

It doesn’t really get cold that often. Not as often as most people would like I’m sure. We need to have proper winters. Reassuringly cold. It hardly ever gets cold enough for snow. Rarely do we get to go down the common with the sledge, or what’s left of it after 4 kids.

The sledging on the common bit is somewhat romanticised actually. The ten second rush of adrenalin doesn’t seem like adequate recompense for the five minute trudge back up the hill, the wet socks and cold, cold extremities.

One year, after Christmas, we took a cottage in the Lake District for a week. The whole country was covered in snow, except the Lake District. It was a bit of a disappointment and a waste of time carting the sledge all that way. It was a nice cottage, over the road from a nice pub. The pub had given the chef a two week holiday over Christmas though so there was no food there. The menu did look good. Bit strange I thought. Folk eh?

Still we had a good time and the cottage was warm and cosy with a wood burning fire. Mam and Dad came up and stayed on their way home from Ann’s and we had a second Christmas present opening. Hooray.

That was a good break. All too often we hang around at home between Christmas and New Year. Bored. It is a waste of annual holiday. I can see why people go off to St Moritz and Cloisters for New Year. Lots more to do. Plenty of action, mulled wine and fondues. Yes far more interesting. Don’t know why we don’t go!

The after that it’s Barbados or the Bahamas, for that bit of winter sun after the snow. Trouble is we have already booked a weekend in Center Parcs and we can’t do both. Maybe next year…

It’s autumn again, which I quite like. It isn’t cold although the family does start complaining that they need the central heating on. It’s a good excuse to light the open fire in the living room and start having proper Sunday lunches, ones that last all afternoon until five or six o’clock.

It isn’t often we have a boozy Sunday lunch. With 4 kids, for the last 16 years there has  always been a small one in the house, which invariably means hard work in the afternoons. They don’t entertain themselves. The computer can of course do it all for them and then it is a conscious decision you have to make. Screens or no screens. Easy time or hard work. So sometimes you have to let go and opt for the easy time and enjoy the afternoon. The log fire means nodding off on the settee with that last drop of wine or brandy just about polished off.

It is also the time of year that I think about cooking, be it plum chutney, or getting the Chrismas cake going. There must be an inbuilt conditioning that around harvest time people think about preserving food in preparation for the long winter ahead. It came as a surprise to me to realise that in days of old the winter food stocks had to last until mid summer, at which time the following year’s harvest started and supplies became plentiful again.

In the garden the apples still need harvesting. We pick them but as often as not they go too mouldy. There are more than we can cope with. This year the apples, blackberries and raspberries have been good but no pears or plums.

The leaves are also starting to show up on the lawn. Leaves are a real nuisance for us as we are surrounded by next door’s sycamore trees. It’s not just the lawn. The gutters fill up. Every year the soakaway drain in front of the garage gets blocked and I have to empty it of compost that has built up from decomposing leaves. It’s amazing how many worms find their way in there. The compost is of the rich earthy type and is a useful addition to the heap at the bottom of the garden.

This year I am going to buy a chainsaw. Last year we cut some branches from trees overlooking the allotment. I kept them thinking they would be useful for the fire. They would be if they could be cut to size. The problem is that there are so many of them it would take me days to chop them. It would do me good I’m sure but it ain’t going to happen. I have always shied away from the idea of a chainsaw for safety reasons but this is the year it arrives.

Of course the grass still needs cutting but it is now too wet. Ah well. Another job that didn’t quite get done in time before the rains hit, although it seems to have been one long rainy day this year. I do like autumn though.

When you are down and having a run of poor results, bad luck seems to come looking for you and there is no place to hide. This certainly seems to apply to Lincoln Rugby Club as they struggle to find form in the 2002/3 Powergen East Midlands Division 3 (North).

On Saturday they played host to Nottingham side Paviors in a game that they might have expected to win. Indeed whilst at times the visitors performed better in the set pieces Lincoln were easily a match for them in the loose and had the crowd in a state of anticipatory excitement on a number of occasions with territorial breaks coming from both forwards and backs.

This was a crowd who, feeling comfortable after the pre-match three course lunch, wanted to be entertained by a home win. Their hopes were to be unfairly denied to them in a game in which the dice were rolling the wrong way.

Although Paviors kicking down the slope went into an early lead with a penalty in front of the posts. Lincoln came back with a vengeance with a period of sustained pressure in the Paviors half. A clearance by Paviors was kept in by scrum half Ewen Hamilton to set up centre Paul Clarke for a superb Lincoln try. This was converted and although Paviors were to reply with one more penalty Lincoln went into the turn one point ahead and with the wind and slope in their favour.

The second half however had a completely different tone to the first and was dogged by stoppages. It is unfair to complain about the refereeing because this amateur game could not be played without the efforts of referees giving up their Saturdays to enable others to lay the game.

However in this case it is possible to identify two specific refereeing mistakes that lead to tries by Paviors that decided the result in their favour.

The first was a clear knock on by Paviors in open ground that was seen by everyone. The ball was picked up by Lincoln but no advantage was gained and the same movement saw Paviors recover the ball to score.

Nevertheless Lincoln came back and despite a period where every decision seemed to go against them found themselves awarded a scrum five metres out from the Paviors corner. Veteran Clive Lewis playing at flanker took no chances and a thundering drive took him over the line and Lincoln back into a slender 12 – 11 lead.

Lincoln held on to this lead until near the end of the match when the second major refereeing mistake cost them the game. A kick forward by Paviors lead to Lincoln full back and skipper Nick Middleton being unable to control a difficult bounce. A further fly hack saw a race between a Paviors payer and Lincoln winger Adam (Sid) Whitwell actually won by Whitwell. The referee following on at a distance of some 30 to 40 metres awarded a try to Paviors.