There's a perversity which shapes our ends

And I'm not talking about my feet (though some deeply perverse deity was in on their design, I tell you)
I was supposed to be swimming today and then meeting Frangelita in Oxford to look at places for her and HF to live. Swimming happens at 12.00 so that leaves me a couple of hours in the morning to do various tasks and then I could have left straight after swimming and had a couple of hours in Oxford. Perversely, today is fiddle teacher's (also swimming companion) over 50's morning. ( We all get together and play our newest practiced pieces or listen to a clever, musical person talk about or demonstrate something that they're good at).
Which is from 10.00 to 12.00.

Which means suddenly, as I'm ambling around in a dopey morning state, I realise that I have NO TIME to do important tasks and must leave immediately and still arive late. So after the O50 thing I have to go back and do important tasks. No time left for getting to Oxford and seeing new homes.

This was rather depressing as I enjoy doing things like this with Frangelita and have done it quite a few times since she left our home for various other places like Uni and Newmarket.

Still the O50 thing was interesting. The subject was accompanying, the performers, a pianist and his wife (a singer). As we over fifties are all late starters of one kind or another in the musical world, we all have middle aged anxieties to cope with. and it turns out that the singer herself had to abandon the clarinet (repetitive strain injury) and took up solo singing at a late age and had interesting things to say about nerves and performance.

And that brings me round to the particular perversity that had me learning to play a fiddle at 35 (yes, I know, just a baby really) and doing exams as if my life depended on it. Two essential requirements for this were practising hard and regularly (and with a kind of manic commitment) and performing in front of a critical audience. Both of which I don't, didn't and can't do! In fact, I had to change my essential self. I really worked hard at it! (I'm talking 2-6 hours a day hard). For some ten years. The perverseness was enormous! The nerves gave me the shakes....I don't know if it's possible to explain how impossible, frustrating, despairing, ridiculous, infuriating it is to play a long, soft sweet note with a shaking hand/bow/ fiddle/body....Especially if, that very morning, it was the best note in the whole piece. Pah! And Bah!
And don't mention scales, arpeggios and the other thing which is so awful I can't remember what it's called even. Something to do with intervals and cadences (which all sound very nice if you aren't trying to remember what they're called).

In the end, I sort of gave up on trying to make myself be what I wasn't and though I still would like to do just one more exam and have a complete set (1 to 8), I've lost the total absorption you need to move from being able to play most of the notes in approximately the order intended by the composer to being able to convey something of the rest of what the composer intended.

Snowdrops. Perverse snowdrops, coming out in January. Still no more snow though.

These snowdrops should have been there last night...however it wasn't blogger's fault they weren't. I uploaded them, and cut an pasted to the bottom of the post. Only I forgot the paste bit! Still on the clipboard this morning!
I'm pretty sure that wasn't what happened the other day though :)