Steinway

Missing the piano - magical sound.  Slow bits of Chopin concertos my current speciality. 

Scafells - sun & shadows

Diego in Ennerdale

Force Bank

My October residence

My month in the Lake District, October 2016

Having another go at blogging.  This is Ennerdale, spectacularly if mistily colourful on Wednesday, one of the very few damp days in my month in the Lake District.





NB Last in Ennerdale 1949 - Black Sail YH.

The rest of the time was day after unbelievably crystal clear day of dazzling sun and blue skies.  Like this.  

Wastwater, 5th October (10 mins from my door) ...

I'm in Manchester now and guess what, it's raining. 

and this is my first day back from an amazing month in the Lake District - gem of a cottage, great location, rapturous PIANO.  

That's Ennerdale, spectacularly colourful on the only damp day in the whole of October.  This is Wastwater on Day 3 - just one of hundreds of unbelievably crystal clear picture postcard views to savour and snap.  10 minute drive from my door.

FOUND IT!

FOUND IT!

What was it Archimedes said in the bath?  If I could remember that’s what I would say now because I’ve just identified a maddeningly elusive piece of music.  That lush thing they play on the tv Darts trailers is the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.  Massenet not Verdi.  Of course it is.  You could have told me.  Anyway I’m savouring and sharing the happy moment with you.  It always brought tears to my mum’s eyes when it was on the wireless.  These You Have Loved – Doris Arnold’s favourite tear-jerking pieces of music on the Home Service in the 1940s/50s.   And now it’s doing the same for me.  Never fails.  Gorgeous feeling of transporting overwhelmedness.

And I’m nostalgically touched by the darts association.  Some of you might know that in our fondest years Edgar and I played a lot of memorable darts in a lot of pubs from Land’s End to Kirk Yetholm, especially somewhere in Grimsby with Derek, and at the Minerva in Hull and the Oddfellows in Pocklington. 

Now I’ve remembered.  Archimedes said ‘Eureka’ in the bath.

Maybe this is what I’ll do: blog all my teary sobby moments.

It's over

It’s all over and I’m back home.  In a glorious afterglow.  What a treat!   Heaven … Valhalla … Elysium …   Moving Wotans, a lovely Siegfried, breathtaking lighting.  And the music …  

I'm not saying I liked everything – some of the singing (excessive wobbly vibrato) was very hard to listen to; one or two highpoints came and went without the slightest tingle.  And I couldn’t read the sub/surtitles.  But in the end none of that mattered to me at all: I was just knocked out by the sheer brass neck – the scale, the scope, the heights and the depths of the whole undertaking.   And the music ….  Totally totally overcome by the music.  And at last I am into the words as well.  Unending source of pleasures to come. 

Seriously on the lookout for the next objective ... a Budapest Ring in June 2015 … Tristan & Isolde at Longborough.  Now there’s a thing.

In the meantime, the Turner film on Friday might take my mind off Siegfried for a few hours.