127. Home and Away - with music.

HOME.

Music.

The weather has been glorious so I have been sitting here doing less than I should and not giving a tinker's cuss.
In the background my old aiwa digital audio system (posh description for an inexpensive stereo) is helping lull me from the slog of extemporaneous composition.
Randy Crawford is halfway through the fascinating One Day I'll Fly Away; Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes will shortly be telling me that they are Up Where We Belong, then it will be Still Magic with Peter Skellern and then still more magic with Peggy Lee's You Can Sing A Rainbow: Mick Hucknall will follow to remind me how he feels Every Time We Say Goodbye and after that the duet from The Pearl Fishers will be sung in French by Nicolai Gedda and Ernest Blanc.
It's one of my personal choice tapes: put it together some years ago and still enjoy every one of the more than thirty tracks on it.
Good job I shall never be invited to choose eight Desert Island Discs.
How do those who get the invitation make up their minds?
Yesterday, in similar tranquil mood, I listened to the Yes album Fragile and marvelled again at the superb musicianship of Bill Bruford, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman and at Jon Anderson's terrific rendition of Heart of the Sunrise.
Well they'd never have time for that on your radio desert island, would they?
Na-a-h, I couldn't select just eight tunes.
I'd be forever hankering after the stuff I'd left out.

Reading.

I continue at a leisurely pace with Bryan Forbes' The Endless Game.
Could go faster but for incessant interruptions and a couple of months backlog of DVDs demanding attention.
So far ol' Bryan has been such darned good value that whatever DVD I have on at the same time as I read needs constant rewinding (or whatever you call it on a DVD) because I become so immersed in the book I lose the plot on the box.
Well, to be honest, losing the plot is not something I find difficult to do nowadays.
Once did a complete three year correspondence course with my radio playing in the background, but that was more than fifty years ago and you didn't have to watch radio.
Come to think of it, I sometimes wonder why I am watching...

Television.

And Springwatch again.
Kate Humble, Simon King and Chris Packham are doing the honours.
Bill Oddie should be missed, sadly or happily according to whether you were or were not a fan, but I don't see any signs of the team falling apart since his departure so I guess that says it all for programme presenters.
They're as necessary as they are popular and as popular as last week's show.
Kingdom is back on Sunday evenings.
Ol' Stephen Fry playing the kindly country solicitor Peter Kingdom.
Lovely start of week tosh with a great cast including a lady particularly popular in this part of the world, Celia Imrie.
I think she has a home here somewhere.
Everybody likes her.
In the first episode, the guest stars were June Whitfield and Peter Sallis, both on the run from
Last of the Summer Wine.
Since the demise of Kathy Staff somebody (tell me not Roy Clarke?) has decided that Russ Abbot, as Hobbo, should replace the late Brian Wilde's Foggy as the token Walter Mitty character.
Hobbo is not a success, the series is sadly limping, and I do not blame June Whitfield and Peter Sallis if they are AWOL.
At the moment they are better off with Stephen than with Russ and far better off with either than with the other Stephen on
Stephen Tomkinson's African Balloon Adventure.
Always liked the idea of travelling by hot air balloon, but this is a trip too far.
What goes up must come down and when I came down it would have to be somewhere flat, convenient for rescue and clear of hazards.
It would not have to be in the middle of impenetrable scrubland or herds of startled wild animals.
I'm sure Stephen Tompkinson and camera crew survived the three episodes - we'd have heard, wouldn't we? - and well done them.
But beautiful though the scenery clearly is, the thought of where we could land next would have precluded participation on my part.
Against my religion.
Devout coward.

AWAY.

Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK, 2009.

In July our daughter Jac and her friend Zoe Farndon are going to see the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright's new opera Prima Donna.
I don't know how Zoe is with languages; Jac is fluent in German and can manage a smattering of Italian: the opera is in French.
Doesn't matter.
Hell, I speak nothing but Isle of Wight English with a side-helping of Invective but that never stopped me enjoying opera in Italian.
Che Gelida Manina is melodic in a way that Your Tiny Hand is Frozen just ain't.
I hope Prima Donna will be a magical first for Rufus and a total treat for all those faithful fans who make it to Manchester.
That particularly goes for Jackie and Zoe.
Enjoy every minute my dears.