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.