Music

I am surfacing. I moved back into my unfinished house nine days ago and have been working almost non-stop since then, unpacking, moving things around to make space for the builders to do the next thing they need to do and working on the kitchen installation. In time there will be some backblips from when I remembered to take photos.

I was touched today that my Afghan neighbour brought his son round. It is Eid (I don't think he was going to tell me, though they were dressed in their Eid clothes) and I was glad that I know to say Eid Mubarak. It was partly to include me in their celebrations but I think he also wanted to see how the house has changed. Which is a lot.

I'm hugely grateful to our choir leader for allowing me to sing in our concerts this weekend despite my having missed several rehearsals. I intended to go to last night's but totally forgot but I went to the penultimate one this evening. Trying to retrieve Rachmaninoff's Spring reminded me of a school chemistry lesson long ago where we carefully poured two different liquids of different densities into a beaker. Where they touched in the middle the chemical reaction between them created a flexible plastic and if we hooked it and pulled incredibly carefully we could extract a thread. Where we pulled too fast it was very thin and where we pulled too slowly it was thick. I tried ever so hard this evening to pull Spring from my memory and my voice but it was very lumpy.

But Franck's Sept Paroles? Oh the joy of refinding that and singing from the bottom of my out-of-practice lungs!