The studio in summer

A flashback to last July, and my new border alongside the studio. The climbing rose, lovely but blowsy Madame Gregoire Staechlin, has now been replaced with a Pineapple broom, Cytisus Battandieri, on the advice of a friend of a very knowledgeable gardener friend. She was right. Pink flowers against pink brick is not a successful combination. The geranium 'Wargrave Pink' will have to go too. I am planning to plant a Clematis Armandii, which has white flowers in late winter and is evergreen, behind the broom.

Poets of the piano

This is great piano playing.

These two artists both have the power to enchant the ear with a single note. The beauty of tone they evoke from wood, wire and steel is astonishing, alchemical. There is magic in their touch. Their command of phrasing and chordal balance is masterly, their use of the pedal (the "soul" of the piano, according to Anton Rubinstein) is inspired and their fingerwork breathtaking.

The absurd snobbery of the classical music world ensures that only Horowitz is listed in the Oxford Companion to Music.

Starting Over

Candlemas. The dead of winter. The studio is a warm place to be on a bleak February afternoon. Traditionally the weather today should be vile if you want the summer to be fine. That's good. It is.

It is nearly two years since I last posted on the old Norfolk Calling blog. What has changed in that time? Well, we now have curtains and a sofa in the studio. I have had a major change of medication that has in some ways saved my life, or at least my sanity. We have re-designed the front garden and driveway.
My father died in June 2007. His sister Judy died two weeks ago. Andrew's mother passed away in December 2007. In two years he has also lost an uncle and an aunt, and his sister-in-law has lost her father and her sister-in-law.
In November 2007 we visited the States for the first performances of For The Fallen, in Chicago and Pennsylvania.
Andrew resigned from work in September to spend more time at home. We are both much happier, knowing that we shall not have to spend our fifties waiting for the chance to enjoy our time together. So maybe we will have to move one day? You can plan, and all your plans come to naught because, so often, life doesn't happen the way it should.

Things look dire on the world front, but if anyone can steer the world away from disaster I believe Barack Obama can. He has an almost impossible task, but I refuse to join the cynics, whether from right or left. Not just yet, anyway. So many leaders disappoint. We become immune to hope. But, like the old oak that Prince Andrei saw in War and Peace, those pesky new shoots grow every year from our gnarled branches. Or, as Philip Larkin has it:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.