'I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day...'

Walking back through the November twilight, waved at my 95 year old friend at his window, it's a little cold these days for him to lean on the gate to chat. I pulled a sprig of bay leaves from his tree to add one to tonight's dinner; we have them in our garden but I wanted them there and then. I feel reluctant to take our late walk these dwindling afternoons, and yet when I do I'm always glad of it, the evening gentle, redolent, somewhat melancholy, full of low light and good smells for a dog, and we always walk further than I think we will.

I remembered a bit in 'Diana of the Crossways', a book I read a couple of chapters of for Librivox, and which I found a trial. I must get back to recording for Librivox, and walking dogs for the SPA, and other socially useful activities. Diana and Redworth return from the Crossways, she unwillingly having had her flight from disgrace forestalled, through a November evening, and she says that now she understands now why he always takes his holidays in November, which pleases him because she has not only remembered but also understood a detail of his life. A nice detail of a tedious book remembered vividly. That sometimes happens.

This has been going through my head lately.

(Worth hanging around on Youtube afterwards to hear other selected Paul Simon stuff: 'Slip sliding away', 'Loves me like a rock', 'Me and Julio' etc, I remembered Az singing that one to me, and other things.)

BIS records, and the importance of copyright

You may remember that at New Year I posted a video slide show I’d made and posted on Youtube, from snapshots and short video clips of Iceland, accompanied by the music of Jón Leifs’ Requiem which I’d lately heard for the first time on the radio.

Then a few weeks ago I revisited the video, and found the music had been withdrawn from it for copyright reasons, though the visuals were still there. I was disgruntled; what killjoy had been so mean as to spoil my pretty little artistic and sensitive creation? For the first time I looked up the details from my purchase of the music, and with possibly even less thought than when I used and published it, I wrote to protest, and ask to be made an exception of, to the recording company, BIS records in Sweden.

Oops.

Ouch.

I will gloss over the rather painful details of the e-earbashing I received, in person, from their CEO, Robert von Bahr, or indeed of my rather puny and petulant initial reaction to it. However the gist of his response and what I learned from it is important.

It turns out the withdrawal of the music is an automatic procedure based on ‘fingerprints’ on the recordings, and it’s done for a good reason. With all the free stuff that’s available on the internet on tap, and with recorded music everywhere, it’s too easy to take it for granted and even assume an entitlement to it, and to do what we want with it, without giving a thought to how it gets there and how much it costs to produce it. The recording companies, especially of classical and other rarer and more specialist kinds of music, pay a lot for the privilege of recording, it’s a labour of love and patience. They make little enough from legal downloads, nothing from illegal ones of course and unauthorised distribution is a huge problem for them, and people taking the line that they are doing them a favour by doing so must be exasperating to say the least.

Not always but sometimes, however, one’s more bruising experiences can end up being the more rewarding ones. Mr von Bahr, like many other stratospheric, passionate, fierce and direct people who don’t suffer fools gladly, turned out finally, and indeed quite quickly, to be quite as good, nay better, at being generous, warm, helpful, charming and funny as he was at being cross. The exchange of emails continued, since, happily in this instance, both he and I are the kind of people who cannot bear not to have the last word, and gradually they became more friendly. He went on to extend a gracious and unlooked-for apology for his gruffness, while still explaining, with patience, eloquence and integrity, how very important copyright matters are and how unacceptable it is to go around thinking you can ignore and abuse them.

If copyright holders themselves choose to release material freely, for advertising or simply out of generosity, that’s their prerogative, it’s not mine just to take it. The fact that I’ve paid for a recording doesn’t give me the right to distribute it; MP3s can be stripped from videos on Youtube, (something I wasn’t aware of) and anyway, taking something for your own uses without consent, just because you can and lots of people do it, is simply wrong, and ignorance is no defence. There is plenty of legitimate free stuff on-line, and there is music which it’s permitted to use as long as you don’t monetise what you make with it, but it’s the copyright holder’s right to decide whether and how they make their property available.

Youtube are going some way to addressing this problem, there is a page of FAQs on the subject of copyright, an audio library of freely available music and a music policy directory to find out the status of a piece of music, but the last is by no means exhaustive and it’s not the simplest matter to get information from them on the subject, as I’ve subsequently found out when I tried to contact them to find out how to go about doing things properly, it wasn’t easy to get an informed and satisfactory answer; they don’t really seem all that interested in creating a better, clearer relationship between their users and copyright holders. Essentially, if you wish to use music and are unsure about its copyright status, it’s better to try to obtain the right permissions than just use it anyway. Recording companies or other copyright holders are usually not difficult to find and contact if the recording’s in your possession, if you ask politely and are honest, as Mr von Bahr said, it’s quite likely you’ll be allowed. A copyright holder can release the music when the video is uploaded and they have the URL, even though it has been automatically blocked.

And you never know, you might make some interesting connections. The experience and the path it led me down was enriching, not only in raising my consciousness in a salutary way. As I said, I’d not paid much attention to who had recorded the music, but BIS and their catalogue are a wonderland. Though they began in a very small and personal way in 1973, they have become one of the most important names in classical recording recording, while maintaining a very individual touch; they are the oldest recording company still run but its original founder and unusual in keeping all their previous recordings available.

Their digital arm, eClassical has an even larger on-line catalogue, since they now distribute material from other labels as well as BIS, and they are nice and easy to browse since you can do so by many criteria: period, genre, orchestra etc as well as artist or composer.

And BIS are certainly not mean with their musical property. Their own catalogue contains an abundance of free listening if you take the time to browse, not the parsimonious 30 second snippets to be found elsewhere, but whole, quality tracks, not downloadable but listenable on-line unlimited. EClassical’s downloads, not only MP3s but also 16 and 24-bit FLAC flies, lossless (love that word!) and very high quality, are probably the best value you’ll find anywhere; they also do a very good ‘daily deal’ - an album download, often something rather unusual, at half price; their latest release e-mail newsletters are a delight, with interesting, personal and informative blurbs, and maybe even a free video about one of the albums or musicians featured.

In fact they have their own channel of professionally made videos on Youtube. Amongst these is a one not to be missed of Carolina Eyck talking about and playing the theremine, the strange ‘invisible’ instrument invented a surprisingly long time ago, once used for spooky effects on old sci-fi movies but now with its own, growing repertoire. From their channel I was also led to an interview with RvB himself.  The man is frankly something of a star, and moreover (as he slipped in with a touch of very understandable uxorious pride) he is Mr Sharon Bezaly. She is the best flautist in the world and, with her shock of hair and smouldering eyes and her gold flute made by an anonymous Japanese master, looks and sounds like something out of a fairy tale. And that’s before you’ve even heard her play...

Another video released under their auspices is this beauty, food for any lover of Tallis: New York Polyphony in a little church in Sweden, performing ‘If ye love me’, with a sound of incomparable depth and richness,

If ye love me,
keep my commandments,
and I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another comforter,
that he may 'bide with you forever,
e'en the spirit of truth.

Play by the rules and truthfully to keep what you love, perhaps?

And in a short time, Mr von Bahr stretched out his hand at a word when I had reposted the Jon Leifs/Iceland video, properly amended with credits and acknowledgements, to lift the block so it is now visible again with the music, in all its ethereal wonder, and I have embedded it once again in the New Year post. For which much thanks.

Spem in Alium on 'A Very British Renaissance', visitors

We've been enjoying the repeat of 'A Very British Renaissance' on BBC4. Found Dr James Fox a bit bumptious at first, but then decided I liked him, he's only a sprig but knowledgeable, charming and not reliant on the irritating, patronising and specious modern parallels so many TV historians seem to think are a good idea. (I let Simon Schama off this judgement, Bettany Hughes I don't).

I wanted to share the bit he did on Tallis's Spem in Alium, and wondered if it was available on Youtube. As a short clip it wasn't, but in fact the whole three part series is, and in quite good HD quality. However, when it came to the section with the Tallis, though the music soundtrack had been present until then, Spem itself was removed at that point, which rendered the scene somewhat incomprehensible and pointless*. 

So I wondered if I could make my own. This took a bit of fiddling about: finding out how to download the complete video, then take a clip from it, then taking the track from the Tallis Scholars CD, then matching the section of the track with his actions, fading it out satisfactorily, and then I'm not sure it's quite synchronised perfectly, but I'm quite pleased with the result. Of course I don't really have time to mess about doing such long-winded and fiddly things on the computer, re-inventing the wheel since I haven't much of a clue what I'm doing, have to use a lot of trial and error, and will have forgotten what I've learned if I try to do it again.

Anyway, I'd recommend the series, and finding it on-line was a boon as we can't get BBC i-player here and had to miss the second episode because of our visitors.

Who have now left. It was tiring but mostly in a good, energetic, getting-out-being-a-tour-guide way, rather than in a tense and frustrating trying-not-to-be-affected-by-parents-nagging-their-recalcitrant-slug-a-bed-kids way. There was only one offspring who, when here with his sister last year, had largely dissolved into a surly adolescent blob, but now, out of her shadow perhaps, was much more forthcoming, pleasant and appreciative, not at all bad company, and we were inclined to hope that the rather original, funny, curious and chatty little boy he once was has not entirely disappeared after all.

Rather rainy and autumnal outside, nice to be to ourselves again.

(The entire Tallis' Scholars Spem in Alium is on Youtube here. You do need good sound quality, headphones, speakers, whatever, and of course I don't really need to tell you to save your sanity and not read the comments.)

*I don't know why, perhaps the recording copyright owner (I'm not sure who the artists were performing) insisted on having it removed, as happened with the Gothic Voices Dufay piece I'd used for a slideshow video a couple of years ago; Hyperion, the recording company, must have done a sweep of Youtube and pulled the video on copyright ground, along with a number of others. I know they had every right to do this, and I had no right to use it, but I found it mean-spirited and cutting off their noses to spite their faces, since more people might have heard it and been inclined to follow up links and even buy their recordings after seeing it than will now, and I never bother reading their newsletters or even think of ordering from them any more. Better I think to take the line that the Tallis Scholars do, that you can use their music for personal videos but just don't try to monetise it, the right to do so being theirs (Youtube are now very quick to pick up on and label third party content now, and give guidelines about this, which is good really). Whole massive albums of music on Jordi Savall's Alia Vox label are available on Youtube, and no one seems to worry. They are, I imagine, seen as free promotion; they make a point of making their CDs objects of beauty with abundant material included that you would want to have for its own sake, and their live performances experiences beyond the recorded music. Rant over.

Paris: the heron in the tunnel

There is a heron which lives in the tunnel of the St Martin canal underneath Paris. It has taken up residence in there every winter for seven years, and flies silently ahead of the boat as it navigates the tunnel in and out of the lights from the boat and from the light wells. The video is at half-speed, and uploaded in HD, so best to watch full screen or really the bird is not much more than a speck. I tried to use one of Jordi's and Montserrat's Sybils as soundtrack, because it seemed as though the creature had a kind of chthonic, sybilline quality, but it was heavy and portentous and all wrong, and I ended up using a fluffy bit of Debussy I found on the computer's sample music, which is much better.

It was one of the most delightful things that happened while we were there. Almost as much so as going out on our last evening, our wedding anniversary, when a great fierce shower of rain came down, and we sheltered under a café awning and watched it tear down the river while the opposite bank was in bright sunshine, then the sun came out and we crossed the Pont Neuf, and I invited Tom to buy me some earrings in a small jeweller's shop to fix the memory. He was wearing a jacket and tie and I was wearing a longish green dress I've had about 20 years - all the time we've been married in fact - which is altogether a fairly unusual sight, and we only looked ever-so-slightly like a superannuated version of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, and as we were walking down the Quai des Orfèvres, an American lady coming the other way smiled broadly at us and said to her companion for us to hear 'Don't they look so good together!' Then we heard pretty music in the Sainte Chapelle, and I cried at Pachelbel's Canon and Tom cried at the singer singing Schubert and Messiaen, then we repaired to the Orangerie on the Ile St Louis where I dipped bread in Tom's oeufs meurette and without being asked they brought two spoons and lit a candle in my apple crumble and caramel Berthillet ice cream, and assured us a lot of people ordered two courses and shared the starter and dessert. We ended the evening unbelievably tired, full and happy.

~

There are still one or two more posts' worth of pictures from Paris, but in fact I find I'd rather like just to post about some home-based stuff, which is good too, and perhaps have a bit of a break, so perhaps I'll come back to them later.

Cheerful things on winter days

Over the coffee cups:

There are worse ways to linger over the breakfast table. I'm currently rather taken with toning stripes; those two blues are somewhat more different than they appear. They're more fingerless mittens for Jantien's partner Jessie (here are Jantien's finished carmine pink mitts).

And then it's that time of year again, bickering our way through the Christmas card list. It's all right really, we got Lifeboat ones when we were in Jersey, and we keep it sensible, are seldom able to reduce the number much but it's perfectly manageable, we aren't such excessively friended people as to have hundreds to remind that we're still alive every year. 

I broke the back of it today and got the overseas ones off all save the few that go in parcels. I intended to go out and do a bit of shopping for these and other things, but then decided against, since insomnia struck at 4 am, and the sofa downstairs, my big blue blanket, a glass of warm milk with a dash of orgeat and Aubrey and Maturin were beckoning. Life and hours are so leisured these workless winter days, I can easily afford this kind of broken sleep, and in truth rather enjoy it, as it's more or less the only time I allow myself to read and only to read, but it does leave me a bit bleary and disordered and out of sync. Also I thought the O'Brian would lull me into somnolence, lapped by the waves and lost in the impenetrably rich texture of detail and terminology and nothing much happening but exercises, with the men's characters drawn bit by bit in bold yet elliptical strokes, as it has gone on for nearly a third of the book. But then all of a sudden it got exciting with an Algerine galley attacking a Norwegian cat, and quite a bit of blood and thunder and the promise and disappointment of prize money, so it kept me awake longer than I meant it to. 

~

Talking of cats, I got out of the car in the drive the other day and perceived I was being watched.

A little face looking from the thuja hedge.

Possibly birding but more likely just exploring. I called Tom round and he enquired if she were stuck,

but she said she was OK, and gave his hand a quick pat and a rub with her head before climbing down. Don't know whose she is, she's friendly and seems happy and cared for, but we agreed we shouldn't invite her in.

~

Lastly, they showed this again in full on telly today, I do like it so much, be it ever so kitsch and camp and tacky and I'll probably be raided by the Taste Squad:

As well as to mark the launch of BBC Music, it's a Children in Need fundraiser thing, it seems, though I didn't know and don't actually follow that. And I'm so far from au courant I don't have a clue who many of the musicians are in any of the genres, but it's nice to see some familiar faces and there's a list of all of them as they appear here.

~

Tom's ophthalmology appointment tomorrow, so must needs find out where we're actually going.

Paris - fish and chips and Père Lachaise and orange oil and music.

Just back from our rather flying visit to Paris, where we stayed in this dear little apartment in the 11th arrondissement. It's not right in the centre so a trip to Notre Dame or the Marais or museums really requires a metro trip, or a long walk, as it was our legs ached fit to bust from walking and climbing metro stairs (we observed that there really aren't as many fat people in Paris as elswhere, including Brittany, and speculated that this might well be because of all the exercise they get taking the metro).  But it's an interesting area, just at the right point of gentrification, a good mixture of the authentically scruffy, with little businesses selling buckets and brooms and Lebanese food and very unfashionable fashions, or offering to mend your shoes and clothes and scooters, alongside organic cafés and timber-lined shops selling Japanese teapots and perfumed tea to put in them. Downstairs from the flat was stand for the free Velib bikes a newish restaurant so popular and fashionable that it had no sign board and only the smallest single menu sheet taped to the door, was packed out lunchtime and evening with very sympa looking Bobo folk (well I like them anyway, they have intense expressions, where natural fibres in nice colours and let their hair go grey, what's not to like? No, don't answer that...), and served fannied up versions of tête de veau and whelks.  

We weren't brave enough to try either the bikes or the calf's head. We did however, spaced out with fatigue at lunchtime of our first day owing to a ridiculously early start, find a lovely bar-restaurant which provided us with a square plate of fish and chips and a tall glass of ginger beer, which was great. Yes, I know, I see your eyes rolling, Brits in Paris seeking out fish and chips and ginger beer, how naff and parochial. But I'll have you know les fish & chips are très branchés in these parts these days, especially in Paris (though there's a good place down by the port in St Brieuc which does them too), and anything, especially any drink, flavoured with ginger is such a rarity and I crave it so that if it's on offer anywhere I snap it up. And I have to say, the French having conceded that perhaps, just perhaps, the execrable culinary - and indeed general - taste of the British might have yielded up one exception worthy of being adopted in the form of fish and chips, they really do cook it very well indeed. The chips are thick and succulent as they should be, none of your greasy little matchstick frîtes/French fries, but are just that bit crisper than from many an English chippy, and the fish batter is light and fresh. These came with a chilled purée of petit pois which wasn't quite like a tin of marrowfats but was fine anyway, and a really unctuous big helping of tartar sauce which was like a proper accompaniment not just a sad little blob of condiment.  I am a restaurant critic manquée; spare me your lectures on how I should have gone for the whelks and calf's head.

The area is also adjacent to the renowned Père Lachaise cemetery, to which we strolled after sleeping off the fish and chips, ginger beer and early start in the apartment's lovely comfortable white bed. 

I didn't take many photos here, or anywhere in fact, since I wanted mainly to relax ans enjoy, and in the cemetery there is so much that once you start you wouldn't stop, and it must be one of the most photographed graveyards in the world anyway, so it would be impossible to avoid cliché. Neither did we seek out any particular graves or tombs, and gave Jim Morrison's and Oscar Wilde's a very wide berth, except we did relent and look up Héloise and Abélard (I was happy to see they were listed thus, rather than the other way around, on the plan).

It's uncertain, it seems, whether either or both of their remains are indeed there, but it's an iconic monument, its history reflecting the overlay of interpretation and appropriation of the story and persistence of the myth. I was moved by the solitary, quietly beautiful young girl who stood looking at it, taking a few photographs then seeming simply to meditate.

It was a perfect moment to be there, on a warm, golden late afternoon in October, the low sun and long shadows softening and enhancing the melancholy, while office workers relaxed with books and newspapers on the benches, and mischievous looking black crows stalked us, hopping from tombstone to tombstone. When we came out we stopped and had a beer in the bar of the small hotel next door, and the barman started cleaning the old-fashioned machine for making orange pressé, and we were enveloped in a perfume of orange oil, which was a small piece of unexpected, memorable magic.

The place was also only a few metro stops from the Cité de la Musique, our principal objective for being there. On one side of the parc de la Villette, towards the northern edge of the city. We did a reccy with a visit to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie earlier in the day, which was OK and you can't really go wrong with a planetarium show as far as we're concerned, but the place did seem a bit big and harsh and scary, and it was the only place we went where we felt the people working there weren't very friendly or helpful. Coming up onto the area in front of the concert hall, though, with older Paris buildings on one side and fountains and pavement lighting and a crowd of other people all going to see Jordi Savall, was much more conducive.

Photos were not really allowed in the concert hall; I took these discreetly then put the camera away for the performance. A few people broke the rule with their phone cameras during the final applause, but they were a very well-behaved audience, which was one of the incidental pleasures of being there, not being annoyed by camera flashes and fidgeting and inappropriately timed clapping (Tom's bugbear). 

The concert was truly wonderful; I can't find any reviews of it yet in French or English, but there's a very knowledgeable one of the same - or very similar - programme they performed at Edinburgh earlier this year here, though even that reviewer didn't know what the huge, booming Turkish battle horns were properly called. Its theme being War and Peace, specifically during the century from 1614 (Savall created the programme originally for Barcelona to mark the tricentenary of the end of the War of the Spanish Succession), so there were naturally a lot of fanfares and praise to God for being on your side when people won and laments when they didn't. But the two and a bit hours flew by for me in a haze of delight, and the acoustics in the hall were so good (and the music quite bold and clear) so Tom could hear and enjoy it unusually well, and the surtitling above the stage relating the events each piece marked were clear and concise. The in the first encore (perhaps Arvo Part, I'm afraid I couldn't understand Jordi's announcement of it in French) the voices and instruments seemed to blend and ascend in a viscous emulsion of beauty, and when for the second they performed an adapted choral version of a section of the Catalan Sybil, the tears flowed. What images return...

What I was able to catch with the zoom was the percussion stuff belonging to the old wizard Pedro Estevan, including his trademark big green drum, and as your reward for getting this far with this great long self-satisfied post all about what a lucky so-and-so I am, here's a video of him playing a 17th century Spanish piece with Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras' daughter Arianna on the harp, where she looks just like her mother and the two of them look like Merlin and Nimue.

~

And otherwise, we didn't go to any museums or anything, but we had breakfast by the Seine and went to the new Birkenstock shop and got Tom some sandals, an achievement of which I am quite proud, but that's another story.

~

Lilies in the apartment, which smelled heavenly.

Gare du Nord, language and Üsküdara

At the Gare du Nord

The piano, a classic upright, was in the middle of the concourse, free to anyone to play.  The two little girls weren't playing anything properly, just tinkling around, but the acoustics were good and the sound floated out and all around the arches and ironwork and up the escalators, it was rather lovely.

~

• Words that exist but I'm not sure I want to use them, and words that I'm not sure exist but I want them to:

A couple that have gained currency in this, the Age of Counselling:

Affirm, affirming, affirmation.

John: You have a girlfriend! ... care to elaborate?
Sherlock: Well, we're in a good place. It's um... very affirming.
John: You got that from a book!
Sherlock: Everyone got that from a book.

Maybe I quite like feeling affirmed.  Maybe I'm not sure I should.

Conflicted.  Conflict, as a verb, as in - this conflicts with that -  has been around forever and is fine; I'm quite easy with verbing nouns, on the whole, though 'impacts on' always grates a bit. It's the use of 'conflicted' as an adjective to describe a feeling that seems rather buzzy and uncomfortable. Yet it is a state of mind it's quite difficult to convey in other words, although 'torn' is perhaps as good as anything. I think I am somewhat conflicted about the word 'conflicted'.

But I'm difficult like that.  I try quite hard to avoid 'empathy', though I have sympathy with the sense of it.

I lived through too much of my life before knowing of the term 'straw man fallacy', so was more easily made a victim of it, or indeed more likely to practise it. What, though, is the expression, for when a person injures another, then makes such a show of their remorse and humiliation at having done so as to make themselves appear the injured party and have the tables of sympathy turned in their favour?  Heaven knows, we've all done it or had it done to us, there really ought to be a term for it.

• Other reflections on language:

The perfect tense. I have spent much time trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to explain its nuances to French speakers who use it too much and wrongly, and often I have ended up advising them to avoid it and stay with the simple past, which isn't easy for them.  But lately I have noticed how helpful its graceful, two-part tying of the past to the present can be.

Grant me chastity and continence from the wilfully profligate over-use of adjectives and adverbs, but not yet.

~

Some of you might enjoy this, it's only ten minutes or so.  The song, Üsküdara, is Turkish in origin, from the days of the Ottomans, but has spread over all the Mediterranean and beyond, so there are Sephardic, Balkan, Greek and perhaps even Hungarian versions, it seems Eartha Kitt even sang it, though I've not heard that, and yes, there was a line of the melody in Boney M's Ra-ra-Rasputin.  This version, by beloved Hesperion XXI, is performed in a very fine Lutheran church in Copenhagen.  

About four minutes in, the singing moves to a recording of the late Montserrat Figueras, which the live musicians continue to accompany.  Hesperion do this quite a bit, I gather, I don't know how long they will continue to do so.  It's perhaps a little manipulative the way the camera closes on Jordi Savall as he listens to then joins his playing to his dead wife's voice, and of course he doesn't weep, he's heard and rehearsed it a thousand times and he's a professional, but the sorrow and love on his beautiful and expressive face is moving to see, nevertheless, and Montserrat's voice is sublime as ever. 

There's a very good article and interview about Savall here.

(I spent ages trying to work out how to embed the video, since Youtube no longer seem to show the HTML code to do so under the 'share' tab, in fact I don't really know why they still have a 'share' tab, as nothing comes up when you click it.  In fact you can embed any Youtube video by using the icon on the blogger toolbar thing. They really do make everything so easy, as long as you do everything on a Google subsidiary of course.) 

Smitten, as ever was.

On the last day of the year.

It's been a quiet Christmas here, which is fine.  We had good food and drink, mopped up the water that the quite exceptional wind and storms before Christmas drove in, had a modest and manageable amount of social contact, perhaps the best bit of which for me was meeting Iso in Lamballe a week or so before to give her the pullover I'd made her - she'd chosen the wool much earlier in the year but only on-line, and hadn't seen it - and also the scarf and hat which I'd quickly also done for her Pascal and Princeling respectively.  I asked her what she fancied doing; normally tireless, a walk, some window shopping, browsing in the bookshop might have been on the cards, but she just said that in fact she was rather knackered and could we just go and sit in the salon de thé? So we did, for over two hours just drinking hot chocolate and café crème and nattering, and a couple of times our husbands rang, mine to ask advice on making hot lime pickle and hers as to whether she might like and be available to come and see a show with him in Rennes in January. I'd wrapped the knitwear up and made her promise they wouldn't open it till Christmas day, and in the evening of the 25th I got phone pictures of them all posing festively in their garments, looking fairly merry, including this one of Princeling in his striped ear-flap hat with matching cracker:

Way too big, like his jumper which he's now just about emerging from, with the sleeves turned up, poor little waif. I put some matching candy canes in with the hat anyway.  I think that's just water in his glass.

I managed to complete a fair amount of knitting for presents, in fact: at the last count, one pullover, one scarf, two hats (plus one for myself),two pairs of slipper socks, three cowls and four pairs of gloves.  Lest I become one of those sad and tiresome archetypal females of a certain age who embarrass their unfortunate family and acquaintances with ugly and unwanted items of needlework which they then have to go through the misery of wearing so as not to hurt feelings, I enclosed a 'knitted gift pledge and returns policy' in each parcel which read thus:

While I make every effort to observe and remember which styles and colours people like (or perhaps more importantly, don't like), making presents for others is a hit or miss affair.  However, unless requested to do so, I would not generally make you anything which I would not be happy to keep for myself.  So, if you find that you could or would not ever wear or want to keep anything I've made you, you are free to return it to me within an unlimited period, and no umbrage will be taken. Alternatively, feel free to swap it or otherwise pass it on to anyone who likes it better, regardless of whether I might see them in it or not, and likewise, no offence will ensue. You'll just get a jar of jam next year.

The returns policy does not, of course, apply to kids' stuff, since I can't usually wear that and Molly won't either, but as most people with kids know other people with kids then just give it away.

Most of the yarn I knit with is fairly easy care and should wash well on gentle cycle, though some darker colours may run a bit, and drying flat and pulling back into shape while damp is efficacious. But you already knew that.

Hope you like it anyway!

So far no one's taken me up on it; Dutch E and B the German Doctor were both to be seen wearing their cowls (joined-up scarves) on Boxing Day; E e-mailed me more than once to tell me she was wearing hers at that moment and seemed genuinely enthusiastic, B was still wearing hers the next day when I ran into her by chance in Ecomarché when she didn't expect to be seeing me, so that was a good sign.  And since they're Dutch and German they're pretty rubbish at dissembling so I think they must really have been pleased. The Quiet American said his gloves were all right but I didn't seem to have finished them. Ha ha, very funny. They were of course (currently very trendy) fingerless gloves which you can use for reading maps or anything in a chilly environment, using camera or phone, drinking coffee on outside terraces etc.  My stroppy teenage step-grandson Benj, to whom I also sent a pair, didn't get the returns policy but I put in a note saying if he didn't like them not to worry, give them to someone else, but if he did please wear them for anything and everything, they weren't precious or to be saved but used.  This was all the encouragement he needed to wear them throughout Christmas dinner, quoting the permission slip at his sister when she told him to take them off or he'd get food on them.

Other than that, we haven't gone much on presents; we generally don't but some years we order ourselves things and hand them over to the other one as they arrive to exchange on the day, but we didn't much this year. However, I did remember to order a CD I've been meaning to get hold of for a little while.  This is Contratopia's Smitten.

I have no idea whether this group is well known in the US, I'd not heard of them until a while ago when I was googling myself, as you do, in the context of this blog, and I came across a reference to a track on their first album called Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp.  This was nothing whatever to do with me, the album had been released well before I ever started here.  I chose the name of this blog rather haphazardly; I grew up under a box elder tree, a fairly unusual species to find in a small town garden in the English Home Counties (we didn't even know what it was and simply called it the maple tree) and a fairly large specimen at that, and I was fond of it. In the film Patience: After Sebald I saw recently, based on a work in which connective elements of coincidence and serendipity/synchronicity are fundamental to the structure and content, one of the contributors remarked that one's own coincidences are rather like one's own dreams: meaningful and fascinating to oneself and boring and insignificant to anyone else.* So I don't really expect anyone else to find this event as magical and remarkable as I do, but I had to act on it. I listened to the sample snippets (as you can on the cdbaby website in the link above) and thought it sounded pleasant, and now I have the full album, I quite love it.

Contratopia (their website) are a contra dance band from the Midwest. Contra dance comes from the French contredanse, a kind of dance where two lines of people danced opposite (contre) each other, a false etymology derived from the English 'country dance'.  It went from England to France and back, then to America, then nearly died out... It's a most interesting story and subject and the link wiki link will tell you more. The music, from fiddle, mandolin, piano, oboe and others, is melodious, rich and varied, its repetitions contain swirls and flourishes and grace notes and key changes and all kinds of things I know nothing about and am not sure I'm using the correct terms for but which please me anyway, and it's instrumental so there are no distracting words to worry about. Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp is a quirky swing number, I'd be happy enough to have it as a theme tune, and there are jigs and reels and airs and waltzes, tunes that make me smile and my feet tap, that make me want to get up and dance (and sometimes I do), and others that are lyrical and poignant and bring tears.  There are tunes you could imagine Emma and Mr Knightly and little Harriet and the obnoxious Eltons dancing to at the ball at the Crown Inn, and others that sound wild and Celtic and mysterious. There are tunes that take you to places in the back hills of America, and others that take you somewhere else entirely.

And not least I love the title, Smitten. Because I realise that I always have been and still am.  Sometimes it's just a passing thing, sometimes, happily, it's for the long haul, but I realise that for better or worse, I've always been smitten by something or someone, and I hope I always will be.

So those are some of the things that have been making me glad at this turn of the year.  There is worry and sadness too, as of course there always is somewhere, but it has come closer; losses and fears are felt keenly, whether our own or others', if one can even clearly make that distinction.

But at this moment, the latest lot of wind and rain has blown over and the sun is shining for a time.


The photos in the video slideshow below were taken earlier this month, the morning of the first real frost of the winter, in the Mayenne.  My brother had been in hospital going stir-crazy, we were about to come home.  He suggested a walk with the camera around the fishing lakes up the road, which their seasonal English neighbours had lately bought, drained and refilled, the same ones where Belle had shown her swimming skills back in the summer.  We left our loved ones, animal and human, at home, and he and I made a long leisurely circuit, with much stopping and looking and chat, ending with some scrambling over chain link fences and sluice gates and concrete ledges where the path ran out.  It was ever my brother's calling to lead his kid sisters clambering in somewhat precipitous places; we had a lovely morning. When we drove home later in low, bright winter light, there were still many autumn leaves on the trees, and they shone as if they'd been burnished. Within a week or so of sudden winter - for this is a year when all such changes have been sudden and surprising, the seasons shocked and hurried into readiness - most of them were gone, but they were lovely while they lasted.

The music is the title track on the Contratopia album, Smitten. (The full set of photos is on a web album here)

~

Happy New Year.

~

* unless transmuted into something worthwhile as art, was the coda.

Fire, rescue with quinces, Mashrou'Leila

1: The radiators are barely coming on yet but we feel chilly and damp.  The beginning of November justifies the first fire of the winter, and our day and our mood lift enormously.

2: B the German Doctor discreetly hints by e-mail that the Quiet American might like an excuse to take a breather from family responsibilities. An hour or two later he is on our doorstep with a box of quinces, and needs very little persuasion to sit by our fire for a little and talk about Indian food.  Grandchild worship is wearing a little thin, it seems; our house is quieter.  I don't quite know what I'm going to do with the quinces, but they are making the back extension smell very nice.

3: My recent, limited, forays into Arab indie music have also yielded Mashrou3Leila.  Lebanese, sometime students of the American University of Beirut, some boys and a girl, an openly gay lead singer, I don't understand what they're singing about, and it may be deceptively political and serious, but it seems fun and lively, and as a lover of aubergines, I couldn't but respond to this:

~

Arab a capella

Well, I was going to post some pictures of pumpkins from the lovely autumn fête at Coëtmieux where Lyse lives, but then I watched Euronews, and they showed some clips from this video, a version of Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry made relevant for a Saudi Arabian audience: No Woman No Drive.  I looked it up on Youtube, finding myself to be the one million, two hundred thousand-and-something-th person to do so (a couple of hundred thousand more have done so since, as I write).  It made me laugh quite a bit, but I also thought that the chap doing it had rather a lot of charm and talent.  He turns out to be Alaa Wardi (the Saudi ingénue character on the video is part of the spoof, though not many of the commenters there seemed to grasp this), and I spent the time I could have been editing pumpkin photos watching and listening to more of his videos.  He's Persian born, lives in Saudi Arabia, has studies and records in Jordan,and is very popular in India where his maternal uncle runs a restaurant. His music is a wide ranging mixture from Middle Eastern standards, Bollywood songs, soft western-style pop, even a Pink Floyd and a Radiohead cover, a tune played very cleverly, hilariously but also melodiously on Vimto bottles, (with a bonus video where you do this yourself) and his own compositions, some with backing musicians - his band, Hayajan and others, on one song his grandfather plays the violin - and singing in Arabic, English and Hindi, where it seems his diction and expression are remarkably good for a non-native speaker.

Best of all though, for me, are his a capella numbers.  I found it hard to choose between these to post here, but decided on this one because the song sounds lovely but also because of how it breaks down all the parts and shows him making all the sounds and voices, and the quirky names he gives them.

I have to say I was delightedly astonished that anything so joyous, humorous and life-affirming could come out of Saudi Arabia (be my guest to berate me for cultural prejudice), though judging by this one which has a refrain which the subtitles translate as 'for god's sake get me a visa before I go crazy' he might have reservations about the matter himself (it's hard to say, I think it might be another parody of a certain kind of traditional Arabic popular song, it sounds fairly deliberately awful).  There's also this very funny little animation where he introduces himself, telling his story and asking for support, since the independent, on-line route is really the only way for original people like him to make their way in the world. I should imagine he'll probably do all right now, I hope so.

So pumpkins will have to wait until tomorrow, that's if we have any power or any internet.  The storm and gale warnings are so dire for tonight that we've decided to sleep downstairs, where at least we won't hear quite so much of it.

Sprucing up my blogging

When blogs were first invented and still weblogs, as I understand, they were very simple shared collections of links to other sites one had visited.  The man who invented them, I believe, rather deplored what they subsequently became: people's personal on-line journals, reflections, opinionising etc, and the introduction of comments that led to posts becoming springboards and forums for discussions. He more or less said, as I remember, that there was no reason to introduce any personal element or affect at all, that one had no reason to think one had anything important to say of any originality, since whatever one thought needed saying had surely already been said and better elsewhere, and need only be found and linked to, and going on about it served no function.  Such stringent reductionism and humility has a certain appeal, but there is surely a logical flaw to it: if no one ever seeks to post any original content on-line, beyond the starkest and most impersonal information, in the end, there will be no more content to link to? 

Now, as many of my blogging mentors who are still around are reaching the ten year mark, the lament is that blogging has reached something of a dead end; that the discussions have moved elsewhere, blog posts are more set pieces than exchanges, etc.  Among the contributions to the well-deserved paean of praise and congratulation for Beth's decade at Cassandra Pages, a piece from Blork, another Montreal blogger, who remarks:

'Where once the platform was largely about personal writing and exploration, blogging is now is a vehicle for competitive foodieism, personal branding, and all forms of marketing'

which was news to me, hanging out mostly as I do on people's personal blogs, though I had noticed a proliferation in somewhat scarily high-faluting foodie blogs, come to think.  

Happily, most of these soul-searchings seem to end in a fairly cheerful if slightly sadder-and-wiser optimism: even if a certain amount of momentum, of starry-eyed energy and earnestness and sense of importance about this astonishing new thing and what might be achieved by it, has been lost, there's a consensus that the whole enterprise has been satisfying, life-changing if not world-changing, and will continue to be so for a while yet.

Coming in a few years later, this being my seventh year in this place, I don't think I had many illusions that I was doing anything very important, except, I suppose, for myself.  From that point of view it became very important indeed and that people came and looked and read was a very nice surprise.  The activity and its place in my life has changed, and indeed grown less intense; I carry and use the camera far less, I have fewer ideas that I think are worth noting, and when I do either lack the motivation to sit down and write about them, or they don't seem so remarkable and worth sharing after all, or, and perhaps this is a function of ageing too, they elude me and I forget them before I get to the computer, or even to pen and paper.  Nevertheless, tiresome moments of blog angst and questioning of why I do it and whether and how I might carry on notwithstanding, blogging has become a habit, and I think a good one, and as the persistence of good habits is rarer than that of bad ones, that's something to be celebrated.  Fellow bloggers come and go, but new friends still appear and many of the old ones are still around, which is a source of great pleasure and wonder. 

However, I do feel I need need to find ways to keep the activity fresh and interesting, for myself as well as for my gentle readers. And as original words and photos of any substance or newness sometimes desert me, why not take a leaf from the book of the original weblog concept and collect things which interest and appeal from elsewhere?  Not in the form of links but as snippets, a kind of scrapbook blogging?  Now I know this is also being busily done elsewhere, in the shape of Tumblr blogs and Pinterest, but those things rather bewilder me, as with Facebook and Twitter, I can't quite be bothered to get my head round making them work for me, and why scatter one's eggs in too many baskets anyway?  I've established my corner of the web here, why set up more flimsy new outposts? And the beauty of blogging, it seems to me, is that, contrary to the puritanical aims of its weblogging founders, one is free to enrich, inform and weave in one's own personal. subjective comment and experience, with observations and gatherings from the outer world, in any way one chooses.

And it doesn't only need to be things from the web. Blork, quoted above in the post from Beth's, also keeps, very quietly, a blog of snippets from books he's been reading.  This rather appeals to me.  In the first heady days of keeping a blog (sound a bit like keeping a pig, doesn't it?!) book reading suffered.  With the undeniable waning of the former, I have been returning to the latter, but of late I've felt the need to make it rather more constructive.  I've taken to listing what I read, but have no wish to try to write reviews or even brief reader responses; it's not something I enjoy doing very much, always perceiving an onus to be a clever bugger, and use lots of smart-alec critical theory terms, or at the very least justify myself as to why I do or don't like something! And anyway, I often don't really know whether I've found a book good or not until months after I've read it.  Goodreads does not appeal, thank you, another on-line outpost I have no wish to maintain.  However, there are times when I come across a passage that really pleases me or which I want to hold on to, so I may take to transcribing them here sometimes.

So those are some thoughts.  This blogging thing is still an amazing, largely free, resource with great creative potential, and I intend to keep doing it for the foreseeable, howsoever.  So here are some pickings.

~

The last post about early music prompted a question about old instruments; browsing in images on the subject yielded these, which I liked:

stringed instruments from different times and places;

some more strings, from a mediaeval enthusiast's Tumblr collection (I'm not going to put links in everywhere, it will be too time consuming)

Attributes of Music - still life by Anne Valleyer Coster.  More of her in another post perhaps.

~

My sock-knitting is progressing, slowly.  It will be a while before I can proudly present a complete pair, and then I fear they may be so riddled with mistakes and bizarrely shaped they may only be good for bedsocks.  I'm enjoying the making anyway. Then I had to stop for a while as I was completely in thrall to Rose Tremain's novel Music and Silence, which contained this delightful passage:

Queen Sophie, when she was young ... loved to be rowed in a little boat to this island and there sit in the sunshine and indulge in her secret passion for knitting.  This activity had been proscribed throughout the land as tending to induce in women an idle trance of mind, in which their proper thoughts would fly away and be replaced by fancy.  Men called this state 'wool gathering'.  That the wool itself could be fashioned into useful articles of haberdashery such as stockings or night bonnets made them no less superstitiously afraid of the knitting craze.  They believed that any knitted night bonnet might contain among its millions of stitches the longings of their wives that they could never satisfy and which in consequence would give them nightmares of the darkest kind.  The knitted stockings they feared yet more completely as the probable instruments of their own enfeeblement.  They imagined their feet becoming swollen and all the muscles of their legs beginning to grow weak.

Wonderful book, and I think I will still think so in a few months.

~

Keeping one's anti-scurvy rations up in winter.  A new foraging find: hairy bittercress.  That naughty weed that throws out those little white flowers that rapidly and very early become tiny pods which, when touched, explode seeds in every direction.  We love egg and cress sandwiches, but watercress is not always easy to find in the shops here; I grow cress in punnets on the kitchen window sill, and American land cress in the garden over winter, but though the latter makes a good purée for soups and sauces, neither seems to quite provide the taste of cress as one remembers it.  Then Crafty Green Poet mentioned foraging for bittercress.  Many of the foraging ideas that are trendily put about at the moment are a dead loss - sow thistles, no thank you ('your friend appears to have bitten a bee...'), wall pennywort tastes like what it is, a spongey plant that came out of a grubby wall, but bittercress is a hit.  Yes, of course it's bitter, that's why it's called that, but chopped up it really does give that peppery, cressy bite in the egg sarnies we are looking for.

Here with some newly emerging chives and Welsh onion.

What I now grow on the windowsill, pea shoots.  A cheap pack of mangetout seeds from Lidl, and these crunchy little things contain, it seems, something like five time the vitamin C by weight of blueberries.  Tasty too, scattered on a stir-fry, for instance.  Here they are performing for the webcam.

~

The weather is perishing cold still, with a raw north-easterly, though we are spared the extremes many parts of the UK are getting.  But the pussy willow is out.

~