Gypsy nights

The thing about fancy airy fairy dinners that cost arms and legs is, however much fun and deliciousness they are, you come away feeling faintly guilty and feeling that yes this was very very good and enjoyable but food means something quite different to millions of people.
I suppose the only way to balance this feeling out is to contribute something equivalent to somewhere it'll do some good.
Right then. A small task for the near future.

Tonight's entertainment was a quite different kind of thing. Fran's birthday present was a gypsy violin workshop followed by a concert with the London Gypsy Orchestra. I recommend them for a thoroughly joyful, foot stamping, hand clapping evening. Grrrrreat stuff.
The workshop was very good fun too...25 or so people clutching fiddles and being taught a gypsy tune (with all the twiddles and slidey bits) by the lovely, talented and vivacious Gundula Gruen, a marvellous fiddle player with a delightful accent ( Eastern European I would guess since that's where the music comes from). I can't say I remember the whole tune but that's no problem since I bought the book with hundreds of tunes and a CD :)
And the concert was brilliant. Both my girls came with me (there are great advantages to having a daughter in the press) and we bopped and clapped till our arms ached. (well mine did). Ate noodles at a fast noodle bar across the road and had a last pint at the pub next door and agreed that Gundula was the sort of woman who, as well as leading the orchestra (on violin) with immense grace and style and having a delightful accent and speaking several languages, probably has dozens of children, at least two full time jobs and could most probably leap over multi storey buildings in a single bound.*
In short, we were quite impressed with her. We were particularly impressed with the way, when the fiddling was too fast and furious for her to conduct with the bow, she did it by leaping into the air!
No photos alas, as cameras were strictly verboten and handbags searched before we were allowed in the concert venue.
Lovely birthday evening thank you Fran :)

*Ah! now I've read my own link, I see that we were quite right about her.**
**Well not about the dozens of children or the leaping of buildings. That was just poetic license.

I was going to write a post

But instead, I went into the kitchen to make coffee and ended up making bacon and egg and fried potatoes and emptying the dishwasher and letting the dog out and clearing up something nasty the cat brought me and hoovering the dining room and.....
You know maybe I need to re-prioritise. (is that a word? I don't know. If not I made up some gobbledy speak all by myself. Clever? If not, I apologise for using it)

Ok so now I'll write a post.

******
Here's an autumnal picture. Just because it is.

Along with the general reorganisation of the activities in this household, there has been a suggestion that if we got rid of the piano, there would be room for a bookcase for Barney's books. I didn't smite down this suggestion with the contempt it deserved. Oh no. I said it had its points and well no, no one actually plays the piano any more but we'd have to consider it.
So now I 'play' the piano every day for a few minutes. Well, ok I don't exactly play it and it takes more than a few minutes. And now I can say it absolutely has to be tuned. It's not so much that the D two above middle C is out, but that you can't tell if you've played it or not by listening to it.
Barney's books? Oh no problem. I am the woman who can fit a whole (LARGE) lawnful of stuff, three children and two adults (one long and one wide) into a mini. Elephants optional (but no custard please). So I think I can manage a few books and a bit of bookcase space. *adds bookcase to Ikea list*

Well then, I'm trying to get music back into my life. It's a bit of a squeeze what with cards and photos and blogging and flickr and etc etc not to mention the piano. But I had a wonderful find the other day. I have been using an 'unregistered trial version' of a certain music programme for a few years and when I moved over to Windows Vista it ceased to perform. Fair enough. But I couldn't get hold of a cheap old replacement for love nor money not nowhere. Until a music store from which I once bought a less wonderful programme, sent me a newsletter informing me that they weren't selling the old stuff any more but had negotiated a deal with Sibelius for a cheap crossgrade! (that's cheap as in less expensive but still a lot of money, however it is a LOT cheaper). It took me three days to decide and now I've got it. With the manual and everything and it works !!!!

And then there's Flickr. I've had a sudden upsurge of comment and stuff on one or two photos recently...slightly astonishing to me but very nice all the same. And there's this thing on flickr called Explore, I think it's like a sort of top 500. I've never been able to understand how it worked (nobody does seem to understand it and pictures move up and down the list and disappear and reappear for no obvious reason) and certainly never expected any of my pics to appear in it....I mean there are pictures I've seen with 400 odd comments and upward of 100 favourites. Well deserved too. Anyway I was wondering how you check if you've got a picture on explore the other day and followed a link or two and suddenly it was revealed to me that I've had 6 pictures on explore! 6!!!
Gobsmacked I was for a minute or two! But now I'm bragging about it as much as I can before the moment of glory fades completely :)

Meanwhile, I've decide to dry out. Last weekends excesses made my stomach mutter rebelliously when I looked at a bottle of rather nice wine in the supermarket the other day. I thought I'd give it a break. And a friend told me her (almost non-existent) pot shrank away quickly whenever she dropped the habit for a while. So I thought mine might retreat a little bit. Also I thought I might suddenly start waking up all bright and bushy tailed in the morning if I hadn't taken any strong drink the night before. Sadly neither of these things have happened yet. And my coffee consumption has increased which isn't so good (except that it's nice).

So now it's time for a cup of tea, ten minutes keeping the piano alive, half an hour with the fiddle.

I would like to have this little shed at the bottom of my garden :)

And I loved the toy windows in this toy houseEnjoy your evening and your weekend and
OH! I forgot.
I started this blog because I wanted to put pictures up somewhere. I thought even I might get a response or two here and there. And of course I love to babble on about not very much!
Well there have been lovely people dropping in and out and it's been fun. But some special people still visit and find things to say after, goodness...years!* I believe there are one or two lurkers even :)
Anyway, When I was fishmouthing at the Flickr explore thing the other night, my thoughts came back here, where kind and friendly and generous praise for my photos kept me plugging away when the sun went in and when the wind blurred things and when I got cross-eyed from playing with photoshop. It was here that I got the encouragement to take my photos to a wider world. I am so grateful :) I so appreciate the support you've all given me. I wouldn't, really, have had the nerve to make cards and take them to shops and market without you.
Thank you all :)
xxx

*2 and a bit years :)

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 :)

I wonder what demon of perversity prompts me every time I start making a phone call, to amble into the kitchen, phone in one hand, to make a cup of tea?
Ah well, it's only taken me eight calls but at last I have a cup of tea, my insurance is sorted, my sewing machine part is paid for, two of Barney's customers are peacefully confident that they will be called by him tonight and ouch, the tea's hot!
What with Blogger and being sleepy I'd sort of forgotten that we had a weekend. Quite a busy weekend too. There was Fran and HF arriving with the last of their posessions and now HF is installed here until they find somewhere to live. And Thursday and Joe (the spanner) Brown turned up for coffee which was delightful and then we had a gig in the evening which was very good..it was for Christian Aid and I have to say, the Christian Aid people are a very jolly crowd. They all dance nearly all the time and there are lots of them. And the girl who accompanied me when I did my grade eight fiddle exam was there. This made me think how much nicer it is to play in a band than to play for an examiner. And, after a bit more thought, how much nicer it is to be gently addicted to Blogging than desparately hooked on making grades.
Still it was lovely to see her and we did enjoy practicing together even if the end result was a fairly comprehensive failure. (I made a note in my computer, which has survived a number of disc changes and collapses and file tidyings, which said, "Just remember, you don't ever want to do this again") .

Speaking of perversity

Look at my next attempt on the white bread.
Clearly brown is better.

However, I'm glad to say, the strange looking flat loaves strongly resemble crumpet. The sort you toast. So we'll be having crumpets (sort of) for tea for a while.
If anyone can give me a good recipe for white bread using 1lb of flour and a breadmaker I'll be very grateful. If it works in our bread maker which I suspect has its own little, perverse demon inside it. A brown, little, perverse demon. With knobs on.