There is always buying1

A cold but sunny morning and the drizzle and rain of yesterday just a damp memory.

I went shopping for the ingredients for Toni’s paella and on the way back stopped at a stall to get chocolate and churros.  Churros are fingers of extruded batter which are deep-fried and sprinkled with sugar.  The chocolate drink which comes with this indulgent calorie-filled excess should be of the consistency of slow moving lava.  Ours was not; it was more like a sweet drink of comforting late night coco-lite and was greeted with nationalistic dismay by Toni.  And these so-called foodstuffs weren’t cheap either.  Another eating place to cross off the list!

Toni’s paella was a good first attempt – there is nothing so satisfying as damming with faint praise.  He chose to make a vegetable paella which is more difficult to bring off because there is not the obvious taste centre of meat in the dish – but the rice was done to perfection and that, after all is the main ingredient!  Damming with faint praise Part II!

My journeys to school devour CD at an astonishing rate and I am therefore always in the market for cheapish (though intellectually respectable) CDs to be used and discarded much like hitchhikers Quentin Crisp described being picked up by truck drivers “used for their pleasure and then discarded like used Hershey Bar wrappers.”

As I am usually driving in sullen disbelief as I make my way (in darkness) to my place of work, I need the comfort of Classical Music to make my entry to school just that little bit more tolerable.  There are, you might remark, two perfectly good Classical Music Radio Stations on my radio but they both suffer from the same delusion and that delusion can make my sullen resentment boil up into incandescent anger in the twinkling of an eye.

I do not, have never and will never understand why Classical Music, even in its widest interpretation (i.e. allowing people like Karl Jenkins with their euphemistically “polystylistic” approach to share a concert stage with composers like Sibelius!) has to include the dreaded and justly despised so-called music designated by the appellation of “Jazz.”

I am well aware that I am dismissing, by using the term Jazz as an inclusive description, a whole diverse collection of widely different strands.  And I am further aware that when Jazz forms part of the inspiration for so-called conventional composers I am more than happy to listen to it.  And if it comes to that I am thirdly aware that some Jazz has set my feet tapping and I have been more than happy to devour quantities of strong liquid beverages while listening to it as a pleasant background music.  What I hate is the hard-core stuff, the modern self-indulgent meandering masquerading as music.  And they put it on Radio 3 and write about it in my Classical Music Magazine and foist it on unsuspecting listeners who tune into the radio in good faith expecting the Real Thing.

So I am more than prepared to provide my own series of discs so that my journey time is conducive to mellow contemplation – even when the music is hysterical.

I have therefore had a wonderfully self-indulgent (but not in the way of modern Jazz musicians) time seeking out the most Classic FM or These We Have Loved selections and listening with glee during the chunks of time when I am avoiding motorcyclists on the motorways.

In one of the supermarkets I chanced upon a series of triple-disc sets which were marketed as “The 50 best . . . “ etc.  In this series I have listened to the fifty best adagios, children’s classics, cello works, ballet extracts, marriage pieces, spiritual classics and so the list goes on.  Some, I have to say I will never listen to again – even with a cash inducement!  But supplies, like teabags, just run out when you least expect and I have been hunting for new supplies.

And, yet again, trusty Amazon shoulders its way to my attention.  I am a great devotee of “Brilliant Classics” – a terminally naff name but an excellent CD publisher with unbeatable prices on their offerings.  I have been um-ing and ah-ing over one of their latest offerings which is a box set of the works of Tchaikovsky.  But this includes all sorts of things which are not necessarily the best sort of thing to listen to when driving with loonies in the morning.  I am looking for something altogether more vulgar.

And Amazon, much in the manner of Uriah Heep when he was pushing the bottle of sherry towards Mr Wickfield in the hope of encouraging him into ways of dissipation, keeps popping up urging me to buy, buy, buy things that they know that I want.

So I have given in and ordered two box sets of innumerable discs for a couple of quid each which give me the best and brightest of Decca and Mercury.  I know that these are the dusty back-catalogues of hard pressed music companies trying to squeeze the last drops out of obsolete recordings, but they are perfect for what I need them for and will cover my travel time for the rest of the year.  And, after all it’s cheaper than petrol and it will last longer!

I also have another non-delivery to anticipate as the fluid organization that is Amazon is dammed (in both senses of the word) by the shoddy and lying inefficiency of the final firm in the chain which actually gets the parcels to me.

I now assume that Amazon is right when I read the email which says that the package has been handed over to the local delivery service and I now ignore the mendacious notes and denials of the service and merely go in to the local office, proffer my identification number and wait for my package. 

Which I later take without saying what I really think because I know that they can get a great deal worse. 

I am sure that companies like the one that is supposed to deliver to us rely on the fact that they know that there will be more hassle when returning packages than putting up with the sub-standard service that we can from them at the moment.