I just put on Making Movies to hear the guitar intro to Romeo and Juliet while I was in the kitchen. If you are feeling energetic the beat of Expresso Love is right for kneading bread, but be prepared to clean some flour up when you're done. I just had a look on yt for the song and found this version, but only suitable for beating eggs I think.
The week of the New Forest Show, and my time is a little strange, because I'm not at work very much. I thought I would have a good opportunity to do some serious reading and play some more mandolin, but I seem to be busy cooking and gardening. The mandolin practice is not quite enough to make progress this week, although I am working a little on my up and down picking, which helps with the speed a bit, but so far, not with the rhythm.
All the boys are done with school for the summer now. I think we need to find them some academic work to keep their minds ticking over, otherwise they will go back in the autumn with sponges for brains - and not in a good way.
Mark has just finished crooning, so I'll go and put on some more energetic music and see what it creates.
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
the right hand, nor the brain, know what the left is doing
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.
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.
Monday, 11 July 2011
minuet
I was not driving this morning up the hill, past the last pig field, now fallow. So I watched the standing crows suddenly switch from random to ranked as we drew perpendicular to the low, wide furrows left after the harrow had been dragged out from the road and back. Each bird stood, for best prospect, on the local maximum, the crowns between the dips.
I had a gentle weekend, a stroll around the charity shops while youngest son partied on the beach; a steady, measured clip of the front hedge - looking carefully for the hidden form beneath this year's long tresses. The form I found was flatter than the last two trims, with just a few hollows where the cows had chewed out the thornless patches. I read the children's books and cooked and washed up and relaxed.
The music is still here. Dried out, my finger tips feel like someone else's. I don't think I'll read braille left-handed now. I find that, instead of finger tip pain, it is finger tiredness that stops me from mandolin practice; that and consideration for my fellow humans.
The hedges, the trees, seem to have recovered from the drought. Under the tall herbaceous stems in the borders though, the earth is nearly bare except for a few drawn stems of grass. No mosses cloak it and, yet, no seedlings sprout. The lawn has kept to green, fruit swells and, in the tubs and lined frames, the ponds and pools are near the brim. My fish, I'm sure, has not survived the December weather, but water will always bring forth life of its own accord. The tadpole pond still has some tiny froggish tadpoles, but we also found, on Sunday, delicate ones with front legs dominating; common newts. We had suspected that we had eggs, but we hadn't had newts breeding there before this year.
I had a gentle weekend, a stroll around the charity shops while youngest son partied on the beach; a steady, measured clip of the front hedge - looking carefully for the hidden form beneath this year's long tresses. The form I found was flatter than the last two trims, with just a few hollows where the cows had chewed out the thornless patches. I read the children's books and cooked and washed up and relaxed.
The music is still here. Dried out, my finger tips feel like someone else's. I don't think I'll read braille left-handed now. I find that, instead of finger tip pain, it is finger tiredness that stops me from mandolin practice; that and consideration for my fellow humans.
The hedges, the trees, seem to have recovered from the drought. Under the tall herbaceous stems in the borders though, the earth is nearly bare except for a few drawn stems of grass. No mosses cloak it and, yet, no seedlings sprout. The lawn has kept to green, fruit swells and, in the tubs and lined frames, the ponds and pools are near the brim. My fish, I'm sure, has not survived the December weather, but water will always bring forth life of its own accord. The tadpole pond still has some tiny froggish tadpoles, but we also found, on Sunday, delicate ones with front legs dominating; common newts. We had suspected that we had eggs, but we hadn't had newts breeding there before this year.
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
I am a troubadour
I was considering a new blog for a new diversion in my life, titled, "I am a musician". This was due to the purchase of a rather sorry mandolin and an intention, after all my previous abandoned efforts, to learn to play a musical instrument. I was prevaricating over the blog idea, because I felt almost certain to fail in this endeavour and so, to draw attention to my failure in public would seem a foolish undertaking. As things have panned out, I began to play a little two weeks ago, slowed largely by the pain in my fingers, only to discover, following an accident on Saturday one week ago, that after all, I was a parent and not a musician at all.
Our day had begun a little slowly, but the list of things to do was begining to stretch credulity, so we set out around 10 in the morning to begin. A couple of hours of activity at a local scouting centre, before a trip to the coast to watch the round-the-island boat race getting blown over, I thought. Just ten minutes of fun in to the day and eldest son fell off an obstacle. I sauntered over, expecting a winded child.
Eldest son was in pain, a lot of pain and I could tell, from my own experience that it was probably not cracked rib pain. Possible bowel injury I thought loudly, but to myself. Certainly worth a check up at A&E. And so it was that we waited in A&E for 3 hours, and then we were seen, and then my week began. We stayed a week in hospital, son and parent. I escaped most afternoons to keep the office work ticking over, returning for medical progress reports and to sleep over, the unsteady rhythm of worried parent and boy under a frequent observation routine. The staff in the children's ward were supreme, I couldn't have wished for better care or information, but in a curious way it was the other parents that brought the most comfort from the stress of our shared situation. I had a memorable and highly theraputic chat one evening with a Mum whose daughter had landed heavily off a rope swing. Just ten minutes in the tea room, sharing our stories of what terrible parents we were and how it had brought us to that place.
Son is recovering from, as it turned out, a ruptured spleen. A week of bed rest and pain control in hospital, a slow return to mobility this week and then a slow, careful return to normality. Three months before contact sports can be considered. I have to smile a little at this final milestone because eldest son has two brothers, which by themselves constitute a frequent contact sport - they have been asked to tone it down a bit, and perhaps they will remember for a few days at a time.
I am back to work and, just a little, back to being a musician. My fingers are still sore, partly as a result of the unaccustomed fretting, but magnified by the poor instrument which, as a result of a bent neck, has a rather high action. The E strings are 100th of an inch steel, stretched hard and deliver a cutting action to the finger tip. I'll stick with the exercises a while I know, but will I find the energy to practise? I never did before, but then I never had an instrument to call my own before. There are three guitars in the house, amongst other things, but none belong to me. The mandolin is comfy, it is petite. I can sit in my crowded office at home and transpose Internet guitar tabs onto it and the noise needs hardly pass the door. Old, bent and cracked (and poorly played) it may be, but I like the tone of the mandolin. I remain a musician and a parent for now.
Our day had begun a little slowly, but the list of things to do was begining to stretch credulity, so we set out around 10 in the morning to begin. A couple of hours of activity at a local scouting centre, before a trip to the coast to watch the round-the-island boat race getting blown over, I thought. Just ten minutes of fun in to the day and eldest son fell off an obstacle. I sauntered over, expecting a winded child.
Eldest son was in pain, a lot of pain and I could tell, from my own experience that it was probably not cracked rib pain. Possible bowel injury I thought loudly, but to myself. Certainly worth a check up at A&E. And so it was that we waited in A&E for 3 hours, and then we were seen, and then my week began. We stayed a week in hospital, son and parent. I escaped most afternoons to keep the office work ticking over, returning for medical progress reports and to sleep over, the unsteady rhythm of worried parent and boy under a frequent observation routine. The staff in the children's ward were supreme, I couldn't have wished for better care or information, but in a curious way it was the other parents that brought the most comfort from the stress of our shared situation. I had a memorable and highly theraputic chat one evening with a Mum whose daughter had landed heavily off a rope swing. Just ten minutes in the tea room, sharing our stories of what terrible parents we were and how it had brought us to that place.
Son is recovering from, as it turned out, a ruptured spleen. A week of bed rest and pain control in hospital, a slow return to mobility this week and then a slow, careful return to normality. Three months before contact sports can be considered. I have to smile a little at this final milestone because eldest son has two brothers, which by themselves constitute a frequent contact sport - they have been asked to tone it down a bit, and perhaps they will remember for a few days at a time.
I am back to work and, just a little, back to being a musician. My fingers are still sore, partly as a result of the unaccustomed fretting, but magnified by the poor instrument which, as a result of a bent neck, has a rather high action. The E strings are 100th of an inch steel, stretched hard and deliver a cutting action to the finger tip. I'll stick with the exercises a while I know, but will I find the energy to practise? I never did before, but then I never had an instrument to call my own before. There are three guitars in the house, amongst other things, but none belong to me. The mandolin is comfy, it is petite. I can sit in my crowded office at home and transpose Internet guitar tabs onto it and the noise needs hardly pass the door. Old, bent and cracked (and poorly played) it may be, but I like the tone of the mandolin. I remain a musician and a parent for now.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Dry, but springy.
Last Wednesday, the 11th of May, I ate the first wild strawberry from the front garden. A taste of summer in what is supposed to still be spring. A dry spring it has been; a day of rain since I last wrote.
Foals are blooming in the hedgerows. Two weeks ago, on the scenic route to work, I saw a total of four foals. I can see as many in the first two miles now. The mares are grateful for the relief, the weight off their legs, still patient to let the new life suckle. The foals are in that flaky phase of existence, as likely horizontal as standing and feeding. They stay close, unready yet to threaten passing cars.
I had a slightly frantic walk on Friday evening, on my way to collect the boys from their evening out. I left myself a little too short a time to walk a circuit on my way there. Across the green and thence into the thin strip of woodland that follows the Western boundary hedge. I saw deer, I got within a tree's length of a cuckoo (I must have heard a round half-dozen calling on my way). I passed a field of 50 rabbits and then, following its side hedge, saw a fox duck through the wire part way up. After four miles, I arrived home with sons, having paused only for an ad-hoc game of blind-mans-buff, in just over the hour.
Over the weekend, in our garden, I sawed fallen hawthorn. Eldest child found a slowworm, youngest thinks he was buzzed by a rose chafer. I saw the first holly-blue of the season. On the drive, the cotoneaster is feeding the new crop of bumble-bees.
Foals are blooming in the hedgerows. Two weeks ago, on the scenic route to work, I saw a total of four foals. I can see as many in the first two miles now. The mares are grateful for the relief, the weight off their legs, still patient to let the new life suckle. The foals are in that flaky phase of existence, as likely horizontal as standing and feeding. They stay close, unready yet to threaten passing cars.
I had a slightly frantic walk on Friday evening, on my way to collect the boys from their evening out. I left myself a little too short a time to walk a circuit on my way there. Across the green and thence into the thin strip of woodland that follows the Western boundary hedge. I saw deer, I got within a tree's length of a cuckoo (I must have heard a round half-dozen calling on my way). I passed a field of 50 rabbits and then, following its side hedge, saw a fox duck through the wire part way up. After four miles, I arrived home with sons, having paused only for an ad-hoc game of blind-mans-buff, in just over the hour.
Over the weekend, in our garden, I sawed fallen hawthorn. Eldest child found a slowworm, youngest thinks he was buzzed by a rose chafer. I saw the first holly-blue of the season. On the drive, the cotoneaster is feeding the new crop of bumble-bees.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Speckled play-off
For a few years, in my blogs and journals, I have felt the rising sap of spring force its way up from my toes to drip gently across my writings and typings, but this spring, exciting though it has been, has gone unmarked. This is not the time to question why, but I feel it may be time to catch up a little.
Spring started, by my recollection, about 7 weeks ago, although I've heard reports of earlier brimstone butterflies which are one of the earlier heralds. I can only claim to have seen brimstones, small whites and a distant brown of some sort so far, but there have been quite a few moths, most of which I have no chance of identifying.
At the Easter weekend we had the pleasure of watching a couple of dragonflies emerge from one of our lilly ponds, without looking it up I would guess they were broad bodied chasers. The ponds also contain tadpoles (mostly frogs I expect) frogs, common newts, dragon and damsel larvae, stone-fly larvae, pond skaters and innumerable small floating and wiggling creatures, including shrimp and leech. We were also visited in the garden and the conservatory by a hornet, one of the early brood even, not just a queen.
On Thursday last week, my slow walk was interrupted briefly to watch the hunting of a slowworm, on the verge by the local football ground. I've seen them there before, but not since the field was re-fenced. Good to see the habitat still suits these golden reptiles.
The apple trees have largely lost their blossom now, although the may is glowing white still. Tree canopies are expanding and glowing verdant greens.
Blackbirds, again nesting in the garage ivy have brooded and been destroyed by a cat (again), jackdaws are in the chimneys and starlings in the eaves. I have seen swallows and heard a cuckoo, an unusual visitor to the village.
The village is gently overrun by the first lapping wave of tourism, the usual contrived flood has been allowed to cross the village road, by someone's judgement then we expect no more frost. Litter has begun to bloom again in the hedgerows, more than is usually dropped by the college crowd.
I saw my first foal a week and a half ago, and a donkey foal a week ago. The cow herd I pressed through this morning on my way to work had a number of small calves. Some of the lambs, I'm sure, have already been dressed in mint.
The weather has been dry for a couple of weeks. Monday was so warm I wore shorts, to the beach, but I was not as brave as my two youngest boys to enter the water. The waves waxed and waned in height, from a gentle lap to six foot high crashing monsters that chased the rising tide-line up the beach and surprised the younger members of a few families, dampening the trouser legs of their guardians and causing splashing dashing into the shallows to retrieve small buckets and floating spades. Th ice-cream choice was a hard one. Rain is now promised, and not just to wet William's wedding, but I hope, to bring a little relief to the stressed parts of the garden flora and the forest trees and heaths.
I saw, from the kitchen, a speckled wood and a new-fledged robin. Speckled play-off.
Spring started, by my recollection, about 7 weeks ago, although I've heard reports of earlier brimstone butterflies which are one of the earlier heralds. I can only claim to have seen brimstones, small whites and a distant brown of some sort so far, but there have been quite a few moths, most of which I have no chance of identifying.
At the Easter weekend we had the pleasure of watching a couple of dragonflies emerge from one of our lilly ponds, without looking it up I would guess they were broad bodied chasers. The ponds also contain tadpoles (mostly frogs I expect) frogs, common newts, dragon and damsel larvae, stone-fly larvae, pond skaters and innumerable small floating and wiggling creatures, including shrimp and leech. We were also visited in the garden and the conservatory by a hornet, one of the early brood even, not just a queen.
On Thursday last week, my slow walk was interrupted briefly to watch the hunting of a slowworm, on the verge by the local football ground. I've seen them there before, but not since the field was re-fenced. Good to see the habitat still suits these golden reptiles.
The apple trees have largely lost their blossom now, although the may is glowing white still. Tree canopies are expanding and glowing verdant greens.
Blackbirds, again nesting in the garage ivy have brooded and been destroyed by a cat (again), jackdaws are in the chimneys and starlings in the eaves. I have seen swallows and heard a cuckoo, an unusual visitor to the village.
The village is gently overrun by the first lapping wave of tourism, the usual contrived flood has been allowed to cross the village road, by someone's judgement then we expect no more frost. Litter has begun to bloom again in the hedgerows, more than is usually dropped by the college crowd.
I saw my first foal a week and a half ago, and a donkey foal a week ago. The cow herd I pressed through this morning on my way to work had a number of small calves. Some of the lambs, I'm sure, have already been dressed in mint.
The weather has been dry for a couple of weeks. Monday was so warm I wore shorts, to the beach, but I was not as brave as my two youngest boys to enter the water. The waves waxed and waned in height, from a gentle lap to six foot high crashing monsters that chased the rising tide-line up the beach and surprised the younger members of a few families, dampening the trouser legs of their guardians and causing splashing dashing into the shallows to retrieve small buckets and floating spades. Th ice-cream choice was a hard one. Rain is now promised, and not just to wet William's wedding, but I hope, to bring a little relief to the stressed parts of the garden flora and the forest trees and heaths.
I saw, from the kitchen, a speckled wood and a new-fledged robin. Speckled play-off.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
I return to people
I see I have missed blogging in a headlong rush of panic that dissipated last Thursday lunchtime, when the capability to deliver my urgent work arrived almost simultaneously with the knowledge that the customer was not ready to receive it. Deadlines still loom, but not in a sleep disturbing way, no longer to a frantic rhythm, just a small rush.
I was, anyway, going to take a day off on Monday this week. A sad excuse to catch up with family members presented. A sincere feeling of sadness, even though in the presence of slight hypocrisy on my part, shared in a religious structure, and a spot of gardening up on a windy hill. Then an opportunity to mourn, chat and celebrate in various measures.
Most of those present have not been seen for ten years or so. A cousin, who I last saw at his wedding, arrived with three children. I caught up on careers, classes, qualifications, subsidiary matches, hatches and other dispatches without once mentioning the fact that people had grown since we last met. How I have missed these people in the chaos of bringing up small children.
The weather was disturbed. Not a dignified frozen and still event, but a wind-swept, rustling, coat flapping one. The earth was damp and the trees shook. The vicar, her back to the storm, flapped like a tethered magpie. The people though, remained calm, unflappable, dignified. Quiet as, at times.
Having gone North with my family, I returned with my sister, and a train. A small entertainment, a distraction, for the weekend, was the procurement of cheap rail tickets for Monday evening. I booked these on a tablet device, eyes straining in the write-only form font, but made the simple error of using a debit card which the ticket machines could not read. The train-line's technical support proved pathetic, but, fortunately, the desk clerk was up to such a small challenge. We got our cheap tickets, and they were accepted by sundry machines along the way. The cross-London route surprised me, because I had forgotten it. A route I knew intimately only (only!) 14 years ago, the corridors, the platforms, which carriage to board. It soon came back and with such speed I had to wait an hour for my onward connection. Time at least to sit, to chew, to reflect and to smile about the people again.
I was, anyway, going to take a day off on Monday this week. A sad excuse to catch up with family members presented. A sincere feeling of sadness, even though in the presence of slight hypocrisy on my part, shared in a religious structure, and a spot of gardening up on a windy hill. Then an opportunity to mourn, chat and celebrate in various measures.
Most of those present have not been seen for ten years or so. A cousin, who I last saw at his wedding, arrived with three children. I caught up on careers, classes, qualifications, subsidiary matches, hatches and other dispatches without once mentioning the fact that people had grown since we last met. How I have missed these people in the chaos of bringing up small children.
The weather was disturbed. Not a dignified frozen and still event, but a wind-swept, rustling, coat flapping one. The earth was damp and the trees shook. The vicar, her back to the storm, flapped like a tethered magpie. The people though, remained calm, unflappable, dignified. Quiet as, at times.
Having gone North with my family, I returned with my sister, and a train. A small entertainment, a distraction, for the weekend, was the procurement of cheap rail tickets for Monday evening. I booked these on a tablet device, eyes straining in the write-only form font, but made the simple error of using a debit card which the ticket machines could not read. The train-line's technical support proved pathetic, but, fortunately, the desk clerk was up to such a small challenge. We got our cheap tickets, and they were accepted by sundry machines along the way. The cross-London route surprised me, because I had forgotten it. A route I knew intimately only (only!) 14 years ago, the corridors, the platforms, which carriage to board. It soon came back and with such speed I had to wait an hour for my onward connection. Time at least to sit, to chew, to reflect and to smile about the people again.
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