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Thursday, October 08, 2009

All this as well!



Never let it me said that I am now obsessed with my health, but I do think (from my lack of symphonic coughing this morning) that I have turned the corner and will have left the ‘pitying self concern’ stage of my illness and moved on to the inconvenient where-have-I-put-the-tissues’ level of wellness.

I have thoroughly disliked this illness and it has impudently stretched its malign influence beyond the three days that my body allocates to serious health reverses.

My Opera CD splurge is now paying dividends as I look with seraphic indifference on the stationary cars which block my way to work while the magnificent strains of self indulgent High Romanticism well up from the speakers in the doors. All the discs that I am playing at the moment are repackaged DGG recordings with little booklets for children. I have not read through the child’s version of La Traviata, but it will be interesting to see how they gloss the fact that the sublime music is from a dying whore!

I am more than half inclined to go back and get all the other discs that I left behind – if nothing else they will be useful extra versions of great music and they will also be relatively inexpensive ways of directing my almost insatiable desire to buy things!

One of the recording that I would never have bought at full price is Stravinsky’s ‘Rakes Progress’ made famous for me by the set design of Hockney. This is an opera that I have never consciously heard so it will be something to get my teeth into. My last attempt to learn an opera was ‘The Witches of Venice’ by Philip Glass which sounded like a pastiche of his work by another hand. Ah well! You live, and in my case as far as Philip Glass is concerned, you don’t learn!

This is my half-day day and I am looking forward to it with a child-like glee. As the illness has officially been downgraded to an inconvenience I hope that I will be able to enjoy the extra time with the sort of guilty pleasure that we teachers feel when we have time off.

To celebrate this freedom Toni and I are going to have lunch out. I will then have to spend the rest of the week trying to remember that it is not the weekend!

It would be good to go to the restaurant where we used to live because I should now be able to pick up my new watch which will have been deposited there by my friendly (if tardy) beach salesperson who has been promising me a ‘superior’ watch to compensate for the two good looking but dud watches he sold me previously. As I have written previously, I still hope, nay expect that he will have done the decent thing. Touching isn’t it?

Faith I might add which was totally unjustified as no watch was waiting for me in spite of the attempts of the restaurant owner to get the dealer to do the decent thing. Ah well.

My resting this afternoon was in emulation of little Hans Carstop in The Magic Mountain. I took to the third floor and stretched out in the glorious sunshine like a patient in a sanatorium and the lounger promptly collapsed! The fact that I was able to shrug of this catastrophe rather than greet it with a glissando of coughing indicates that I really am over the worst of the lingering illness!

At the moment I am reading a book of extracts called ‘Adventure’. It has a cover illustration of one of those lunatic climbers hanging from a rock by his fingertips with an eagle lurking in the background. Not content with a photograph this has been rendered as a painting which looks completely wrong with the legs of the hapless mountaineers executing a sort of balletic jeté as his muscles bulge in all the wrong places and seem to assure him of a swift death as his scrabbling hands fail to drag himself to safety.

The extracts range from Mark Twain to Doris Lessing taking in The Prisoner of Zenda and White Fang along the way – quality, but no real appeal to modern students, and most of the extracts out of copyright too I would expect!

Although the books is almost entirely useless from a practical teaching point of view I am enjoying revisiting books which I have more than half forgotten. Who now reads Paul Berna? Good, if educationally pointless fun!

Who can ask for more?

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