A damper cooler week. The flora seem to have recovered from the dry spring and everything that is still buried up to the roots is green. Even the severely cut lawns are verdant rather than their usual summer brown. Resurgent insects, according to headlines recently, and I can vouch for this. More bees, more wasps, a few more butterflies and, in the hedge at the bottom of the garden a wasps' nest. I have been waiting for a week now for a dry but cool morning to go and spray the wasps' nest - I wonder if I should. They are the small English wasps, not their larger European cousins, and until the de-coherence of the nest in the autumn, they are well behaved and help to remove insect pests from the garden.
I contrived a walk past a music shop on Saturday and while my two of my children were happily engaged in testing electric guitars and keyboards, I sneaked a quick pluck of a mandolin. Quite a pretty instrument, a little quiet, but with such a low, easy action. I played a few bars of the simple tunes I have been learning with and only muffed a couple of frets; my fingers hardly felt the strings. Thanks by the way to Becketts of Southampton. My own sad instrument is still teaching me though, and I still have reservations about my staying power for learning to play, so for now I'll act like I can't afford a new instrument.
I was finding on Monday evening, that I could watch my left hand moving over the frets almost asthough under their own volition. I was a simple observer of this playing hand. Unfortunately, as this was happening, the connection between my hands was falling apart completely and I found myself trying to pluck strings I hadn't got fretted. I have learnt about four pieces that I am willing to play as anything more than exercises, without yet getting to the part of the book where the 4th string (the G) is introduced. This is using Hal Leonards mandolin method book I, which comes with a CD. I had to use the CD once so far because my own rendition of the set of notes in approximately the right order off the stave did not call to memory any tune I had ever heard. I'm practising in bouts of about 15 minutes, after which I find that my fingers are no-longer so willing to press hard enough and my pads are beginning to soften.
Despite any misgivings I may express about my specific specimen of mandolin, I think the madolin is a magnificant instrument to learn as a first, if only for its size. As it happens I also like the sound and the similarity to a guitar (It is partially possible to translate guitar tabs for the mandolin). Some of the fingering skills I've picked up translate to the guitar, others not. Of course with a first instrument there is the fun of learning to read musical notation, of keeping rhythm, of learning to both feel and listen to what the instrument is doing, and of boring other people to death with the whole process, sorry.
We had the pleasure, last week, of my youngest's final primary school production. He will be joining his brothers on the bus to school next term. I remember thinking, as he started school for the first time, that we were right out of babies. Soon will will have only teenagers. I walked to the lounge this morning, 8 minutes before the school bus, to find out whether my eldest had eaten any breakfast to discover that he hadn't got out of bed yet; see? teenagers.
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