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Wednesday, March 06, 2013

No comment. Especially on the rain!






This is now beyond a joke and back again!  The rains continue with a spitefulness and personally directed vindictiveness that is, to put it mildly, unsettling.  Pools of standing water augment all the fairly flat external surfaces of the school and the dampness is beginning to penetrate our very souls!

At least the first stage of my marking is done.  Though I think I will keep that to myself for fear of being set upon by my colleagues who work nothing but “long” days!

Today, at the end of school, I have to go down the hill and into the city to experience another aspect of my season ticket to the Liceu.  This time it is a concert of some soprano or other – and at least it means that I have not had to do any “homework” for this music, I can just sit back and enjoy.

Talking of enjoyment, I was able to listen to some of my new music and have discovered more of the long lost Gretry music that used to accompany the horror of packing when I was in university.  Little but little I am reconstructing the old LP that I used until it became so scratched that it was virtually unplayable.  I did not, of course, throw it away – that would have been too callous after all the amelioration it had offered me in the heartbreak of clearing my room for the vacs!

I also listened to some of Prokofiev’s film music and discovered that I know some of it quite well – that is at least partly thanks to the JCR of Neuadd Lewis Jones in Swansea University and the dogged determination of late night BBC2 to make me film literate by illuminating the more obscure glimmers of foreign arty cinema!

As far as I can tell I now have more than enough music in the form of new discs to keep me humming until the end of June when my driving will drop dramatically as I will no longer need to go to Barcelona on a daily basis.

I have fed disc after disc into the hungry maw of my iMac and have barely dented its memory.  There is now over a fortnight of solid music waiting for me to immerse myself in and many more discs waiting to be slotted in.

In iTunes there is part of the display which informs the viewer of the number of times that they have listened to a piece of music.  As you can imagine, as this is a new machine, there is a sparse scattering of numbers indicating to whoever looks that I have listened to virtually nothing.  Of course, my music is on a number of platforms, an embarrassing number of platforms now I think of it ranging from the iMac, to the MacBook Air, to iPad, iPods and even my iPhone 5 – all offer me a section of my musical holdings.

Having said all that, even by combining the play lists of each one of them there must still be a substantial amount of music that exists simply as electronic code and has never been brought out into the open.  The only way I will hear some of it is when I put things on random play and then wait for each new serendipitous delight to reach my eardrums!  Sometimes it is a piece of Mozartian recitative; sometimes an obscure 80s pop song, but more often than not it is some half remembered fragment of music that lurks just beyond confident attribution!  It’s all great fun and a guilty pleasure!

Last night, just before I went to bed I had a little spurt of academic enlightenment and I got a couple of pages of The Essay done – or at least into some sort of shape that can be whittled into something acceptable in due course.  I find that I am writing the essay piecemeal with odd paragraphs rising from my subconscious and demanding to be written.  If I am not careful what I am going to end up with will be a patchwork quilt of perceptions rather than a flowing discourse.

I now have my trust paperback with me at all times, but I must admit that I am looking forward to the luxury hardback which should be with me by the end of the week – and just in time for the Big Push over the weekend to get at least a first draft out of the way.

Next week is going to be a little fraught with examination marking, meetings and running deception taking up most of my conscious time and there will be little left for the fripperies of self-indulgent academic study!

Lentil soup was the start of my meal this lunchtime, followed by an uninspiring salad of which the most enterprising party was an odd rice salad in the mayonnaise of which I am sure I detected a hit of mustard.  Whatever - easily forgotten!

One of the bright things about this dull, dull day is that before the concert I am giving Suzanne a lift and perhaps we might partake of something before the performance.  It is not worth my while going home at the end of school and then coming back out to Barcelona – the traffic makes that an unattractive proposition, so into Barcelona straight from school it is. 

In the rain. 

With city drivers taking absolutely no notice of the changed conditions. 

Joy!

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