Sumer is Icumin in ...

After a grey start - I suspect we get the East Coast weather in Dunoon when it wafts through the Central Belt corridor - the sun gradually changed from a silver glimmer to bright, hot, real sunshine and all seemed well with the world. MY breakfast was interrupted by a clinic visit at the hospital, though I got my porridge when I came home again; the rest of the morning was taken up with very routine things: two loads of washing done and out to dry; cleaning the sink and surroundings; fitting a new ironing board cover ... and some Italian, natch. 

But the afternoon? Just lovely, and spent on one of the walks we specially enjoy on a lovely afternoon, along the south-facing shore of Loch Striven. Mostly I took photos of plants and butterflies, but the colours, so evocative of the Ukrainian flag, insisted I feature them in a photo of gorse, blue water, pale blue sky - hence this blip.

Over dinner we were listening to Tippet's Concerto for Double String Orchestra on the radio and I began to think about how it happened that it was so familiar to me, a piece I feel l've known for about 60 years. I recalled that my move from listening to pop music began with the school orchestra, when I'd be thrilled to hear on the radio something we were playing - a rare thing when the Third Programme, where the serious music was, only began at 6pm ( with Britten's Young Person's Guide as its opening theme). Suddenly I stopped buying pop singles (6/8d, maybe once a month) and started saving up for classical LPs (21/- for Ace of Clubs discs). I'd hear a piece, perhaps at the SNO proms, and buy the record which would have something else by the composer on the B side, and because I couldn't afford to have records on which I only listened to the A side I'd play both sides to death. What with that and the SNO Proms, and then the Saturday night concerts, as well as playing Beethoven and Haydn in the orchestra and singing Parry and Vaughan Williams and madrigals in the choirs in school, I garnered this big hinterland of familiar pieces that even now make me feel quite strange when I hear them - as if I'm actually back there in the 60s when it all happened. 

And that, O Best Beloved, was our dinner conversation tonight, to the background of Tippet played wonderfully.