John's Quavering Pencil

Yesterday I spent most of the morning preparing Sunday lunch. I made an effort, since we had invited a guest to share the meal with us. I started with a rather hearty cream of vegetable soup. Normally, I whizz the base of the soup in a processor before finishing it off with cream. This time, having picked up a tip from Jamie Oliver, I processed the veg before frying them briefly with garlic and onion.This certainly provided an interesting texture to the dish but it was not particularly subtle. I possibly used a little too much white wine in preparing my stock.

Cream of vegetable soup

The main course went a little better, I feel. I fried fish cakes in a pan and served them with a selection of Chinese vegetables stir fried in a wok. I put some good ingredients into the fish cakes: boiled cod fillets, mashed potatoes, chopped basil, chopped hard boiled eggs, lemon juice, grated nutmeg, seasoning and a couple of pinches of cayenne pepper. Having shaped the individual cakes, I rolled them in beaten egg and coated them in multigrain bread crumbs. They tasted delicious.

Ingredients for the fishcakes

For pudding, I made an apple crumble. I slipped some cinamon and grated lemon rind into the chopped apples and made sure they were plenty sweet enough. For the custard, I cheated: I bought a very nice tub of the stuff at my local supermarket.

Having glugged my way through a fair amount of red wine during the course of the day, I made sure that I drank plenty of fruit squash towards the end in order to avoid the thick head this morning, and I am happy to tell you that this strategy seems to have worked. This morning, I popped down to the doctor’s surgery to get a flu shot. The nurse told me that my arm might be stiff later today. I am doing a show at the Cup ‘n Spittle tonight, so I hope that works out ok in terms of playing the piano.

I want to finish the novel I am reading today (The Gaudy by J.I.M. Stewart) then I will take the latest bagful back to the Lit & Phil at Newcastle tomorrow and pick up a fresh batch. Talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Things have necessarily been quiet over this past week in terms my internet activity. The explanation is that I had a hardware problem with the power transformer plug for my ISP router. It was an interesting experience to see how I fared whilst becalmed in the cyberspatial doldrums. Anxiety gave way to boredom, although I did attempt to plug the gap with more extensive bouts of reading. I also watched a few TV cookery programmes. Some years ago, I used to spend a lot more time in the kitchen, conjuring up delectable little delights. For some reason, I stopped doing it. I am currently attempting to get back into the swing of culinary adventures, although I find that it is more challenging now that I need to keep more than half an eye on my weight. I’m not sure why I gravitate towards recipes involving oodles of double cream and butter, but somehow I do.

I missed the buzz of streaming my shows to Second Life while my internet was down. Yesterday, I played The Ragged Edge and thoroughly enjoyed myself. That was the first gig since Saturday at Helle’s Angels Club. I shall play my own little venue, Terra Fyrmusica on Saturday and then Cascadia Harmonics on Sunday, as usual. Cascadia is going to close for a virtual rebuild. Tishe, who runs the venue, feels that things have become stale and audience numbers have been dropping. I am told that this is happening across the virtual world and Krel has recently opined that the bloom of live music may have faded from the rose of Second Life gigs. I tend to play to such small audiences that I don’t think it will affect me too much. There has been some discussion about musicians with ‘edge’ not being able to pull in large audiences. I have not been mentioned as a musician with ‘edge’ and I am comfortable with that, at least for the time being. Part of me would like to be able to play melodious tunes on the digital grand piano in the virtual palm court of some splendid hotel of yesteryear. I would love to be able to do justice to the canon of the American Songbook (I am thinking of the sort of thing Rod Stewart has done in the latter phase of his musical career). However, as soon as I start to get comfortable with that notion a small voice nags away in the back of my mind. I have not produced any original music for a while now. Perhaps I will soon. Whilst I think it unlikely that I could manage razor sharp, something in the order of a schoolboy’s blunt penknife should be possible.

Speaking of knives, the scapel is about to be applied to public and social spending in the UK. It doesn’t surprise me. England is no longer a significant maker-of-stuff on the world stage. When I was a postgrad student in Sheffield in the 1970s, it was still possible to hear the pounding of the mills at night, as the world famous Sheffield steel was rolled out. When I later moved up to Sunderland on the Wear, it was possible to see the last of the big ships being constructed and repaired in the yards. There was still a huge coalfield in the Durham region. All that vanished during the decade of the 1980s. And so with production moving to China, Asia and other regions of the previously under-developed world it is perhaps unsurprising that England, the leader of the industrial revolution, should be one of the first to exit as a post-industrial economy. The spending cuts that are due to be announced by the UK government next week will involve staggeringly huge numbers. I grew up as a child in the late 1940s and 1950s in what was quaintly called the years of austerity; basically, the country although victorious from WW2, was totally bankrupt. Life was dour: socks were darned, cuffs and collars were turned, drab economical clothes were handed down from older to younger children. There were ration books with coupons for food, sweets and tobacco.

In the UK, in the foreseeable future, I think that many of our city centres will die as retail business grinds to a halt. The boarded up shop fronts will make it hard to maintain any semblance of civic pride. Anger within the population will lead to disillusionment, especially over politics and politicians. Even if the Labour party does well out of the backlash, the books still have to be balanced. The burden of national debt will not go away. At these times, it is prudent to avoid extreme political solutions, especially those that simplistically look to pass the blame on scapegoats, be they shady bankers, greedy entrepreneurs or convenient minority groups within the existing population.

The concept of the working class is, even now, in the process of semantic disintegration. The strong trades unions of yesteryear retain significance for social historians, but drift towards irrelevance in the contemporary world: there is scant power in a trades union if, in point of fact, hardly any folk are plying that trade. The middle class has traditionally been drawn from senior management in industry, together with those in the main professions. Although there is a rough pecking order, one might lump together accountants, lawyers, doctors, teachers, professors and the like. If the definition of the middle class is extended to what used to be called ‘white collar’, then we may safely bring in quite a few from the civil service and local government. Those middle class who are parasitic on industrial production will, obviously, decline in number. The others are likely to be dependent upon the public purse in one way or another. This purse, so we are told, is more or less empty. The middle class will thus shrink massively.

One might speculate as to what musical genre will be best suited to the coming trials. I have always thought punk to be very close to childish rage, a manifestation of an angry and aggressive id, to draw upon our friend Dr. Freud. The blues would seem to be tied more closely to the sorrow born of too much hard work and exploitation. Although there will be sorrow, I am not sure that the cause is going to be overworking. Maybe the post-industrial blues will be electronic in nature. Something infinitely repetitive and soothing, to while away the endless hours of luxury-deprived boredom. Does Phillip Glass come to mind?

Society will need its opiate, I fear. I don’t think alcohol is up to the job (beer for the workers and  gin & tonic for the middle classes is an image that will fade as the sun finally sets on the industrial age of post-Victorian England). My guess is that a drug will be manufactured that is cheap to make, safe, and will maintain the population in a contented and somewhat soporific state.  Of course, there may at first be outrage. In the end it will be seen as a sensible solution to the problems raised by ever more strident and petutulant demands for the legalisation of cannabis. An essentially medical rhetoric drawing upon the pseudo-psychological lexicon of mood enhancement terms (see Abnormal Psch. 101)  should be enough to placate the more obstreperous members of the House of Commons.

Progress in this direction may come to be taken as evidence that we are drifting closer to Brave New World, as opposed to 1984. However, the number of surveyance  cameras on our streets and in our public buildings has increased exponentially since the year 1984, and the burgeoning sales of large flat-screen TVs can only be described as Orwellian. Perhaps the future will be a cross between the two. Yes, the 21st century is starting to feel decidedly Huxwellian.

Last night I went to Durham Cathedral to hear Sir John Eliot Gardiner conduct1 the Monteverdi vespers. This was quite an event. We (the audience) queued in a very long and orderly line snaking all the way around the green outside this imposing 12th century building, in the dusk. Eventually we assembled. There were three choirs, the English Baroque soloists, and His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts.

I sat in the transept which was the seating that is provided on the left arm of the cross, as it were. There was a huge circular stone column between me and the orchestra, so the sound reached my ears via a deflection from the roof; the roof was so high that it was1 beyond my ordinary field of vision and I had to crane my head back in order to see the arches which connected the columns of stone. The choir did move around from time to time during this evening-long performance. Once they faced me, in the transept, and at that moment the quality of sound greatly improved. Generally, however, the sound was muddy. It was as if the band was using too much reverb in the mix, to apply a contemporary electronic effects analogy to the cathedral’s acoustics.

The degree of echo was sufficient to make it almost impossible to follow the Latin lyrics, even though they were published in the programme with an English translation alongside. A sung consonant has little chance of survival in such a breath-takingly high stone-roofed vault.

I will say one thing for Monteverdi, he gets a lot of musical mileage out of one line of lyric.

[Note: This post is a couple of days late being assembled. I switched to the new Beta version of Internet Explorer 9 and found that I could not edit the text of my bloog on the WordPress website. I subsequently downloaded the Mozilla Firefox browser and it works perfectly]

At last I seem to be getting back into some moderately serious cooking. Today I made a meal for my friends Tony and Costello. I started by cutting some salad leaves from the lettuces I have growing in my garden. These have been wonderful over the summer months but they are starting to bolt now; I think this will have been the harvest’s swan song. I added a few slices of red and yellow peppers for colour, some chopped spring onions, and cubes of pear for interest. I grated a sprinkling of lemon rind onto the plates and made the dressing with olive oil, lemon juice and a good pinch of Colman’s English mustard powder.

Assembling the ingredients

For the main course, I made coq-au-vin-blanc. I have a large Le Creuset pan that takes a 1.5 kg chicken perfectly. I make this with carrots, parsnips, shallots and garlic. Once the vegetables have been peeled I fry them in the pan, take them out, fry the chicken briefly, put the veg back in around the chicken and then fill up with boiling stock. I put foil over the breast and transfer the pot to the oven for half an hour. Then I remove the foil, whack in a bunch of button mushrooms, and stick it back for another half hour or there abouts. The stock I made with white wine and water, onion, carot, and celery. I made a muslin herb bag and cut the herbs from my garden for this (rosemary, sage, thyme, and bay leaf).

A lot of peeling and chopping goes on (shallots)

I also cooked some potatoes with a full head of garlic which I broke into peeled cloves. I mashed the potatoes with the garlic and a little butter. I carved the chicken and plated it up with the mashed potato and the vegetables that had cooked with the bird. I made a gravy by reducing the stock in the pan. Normally, I would have thickened it with a little flower in butter pellets but this time I used a small amount of corn starch.

For the pudding, I made some meringues and sandwiched them together in pairs with a filling of fromage frais mixed with marscapone cheese (I flavoured this with a teaspoon of vanilla essence). I plated the meringues in soup bowls with some fresh raspberries and blackberries. For good measure, I put a spoonful of the cheese filling on top of the fruit, too.

The wonderful shape of home-made meringues

For once, everything went according to plan, and it was absolutely delicious. It was necessary to devote most of the day to shopping and preparing the ingredients. I made lists and worked methodically through the various stages of the cooking, in a relaxed fashion. In the evening, I did drink rather a lot of red wine, I have to admit.

This blog has been so dreary lately, I feel it is time to brighten things up a bit. So here is a pic of one of my fuschia plants in flower. They are very pretty at this time of the year.

A blooming fuschia!

These past few weeks since my daughter emigrated half-way across the world, have been hard. Some days I feel a little better, a little stronger. Other days are clothed in a grey, bleak mist, darker than the North sea that pounds upon the coastline only minutes from where I live.

Of course, folks who we know feel that it is a wonderful thing that has happened. It is very adventurous of our brave daughter. I can agree with all that. However, I look to the future, from my point of view. I rather imagine that I shall see my daughter at best a couple of weeks per annum (and probably a lot less than that, if truth be told, as time goes by). My ability to travel is limited by the expense that my pension can afford. The hard lesson of this is that you cannot live your life through your adult children, Letting go does mean ‘goodbye’. If they have emigrated, as opposed to living in a nearbye city, you are forced to move on, New days continue to dawn. With flare there is the possibility of creating new excitements to fill the void. It is possible to be positive.

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

The past few days I have been scarifying my lawn. I do not have a machine, just a tine rake. It provides me with lots of exercise, so in that way it serves two purposes. I intend to do a thorough job on it this year and have bought some extra grass seed, nutrients, and top dressing. It has been raining hard today but hopefully I shall be able to finish  it off later this week. Things seem to be settling down for me now. I am back into some serious music practice and I am once again playing my regular shows in Second Life. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

There is a LOT of this stuff

The last supper occurred in an Italian restaurant and there were, coincidentally, about a dozen of us present. The grown-ups sat at one end of the long table and looked, for the most part, rather glum. The younger generation, all now in their mid-20s, seemed to be enjoying themselves; it was they that provided the lively conversation and peels of laughter.

After the meal, back home, there remained some final packing and organising to be done. We were able to snatch a few hours sleep but the household woke up at around 3 a.m. in preparation for the taxi which was due to arrive at 4 a.m. The cases were finally stowed; hugs and goodbyes took place in the dark street outside, with tears hovering in the background but no longer in full flood. We watched the red lights of the taxi disappear, as it turned out of our street. And she was gone, off on her grand adventure.

I got a little more sleep but woke up fairly early. I felt driven by a compulsion. I had to tidy the house and remove the traces of her existence that lingered in our sitting room and kitchen. I threw out her cereal box and her apple juice. I put the things she had not been able to pack back into her room. Then I tidied up our sitting room which had been used as a storage depot for all her belongings while she was sorting things out. There remained four large cardboard boxes which housed stuff that might need to be shipped separately once she has a place to live. I pushed them into a line and found a large table cloth to drape over them. Later, I placed a fruit bowl in the centre. I feel that the packing cases have now become, if not an objet d’art, at least an interesting piece of furniture that can live comfortably with the rest of the room for however long it takes.

Hiding the packing cases

Fruit bowl on packing case podium

In the end, the waiting, the tiredness, the planning, the endless list of things to do, combine to ware one down. I find myself entering the Que Sera, Sera mode of being. Maybe she will permanently live abroad. Maybe she will come home again by Christmas. Maybe she will be somebody who lives in two countries, moving back and forth between them over the years. One thing is for sure: the previous chapter has now closed. It is not possible to say what will happen in the next chapter. I think that she will now develop her life on a more independent basis and that will be the case even if she does return to England. I have not yet worked out how this new chapter in my own life story will develop or will be affected by the change that has been visited upon me. I do not feel pessimistic. I always knew that the past couple of weeks would be very difficult, and I expect it will take a while for me to adjust emotionally to the new situation. Hopefully, I shall be able to share with you some of the things that I do.

I could have written up my thoughts about my daughter leaving home in a private diary. However, I feel sure that at least some parents may have to experience something similar to what I have just gone through. Obviously, for many, their offspring may get married and live happily ever after in a nearby neighbourhood or city, producing lots of grandchildren and therebye providing them with an extended family. That idyllic situation is by no means universal. I suppose I have been primarily addressing those for whom such a warm cosy image remains elusive. By doing so, I would like to think that I have perhaps been able to offer a modicum of hope for those in need of it. Farewell, for now, my dear blogophiles. I think I shall be back onto a more even keel from now on.

In approximately 24 hours time, my daughter will leave home for good (at least, that is her firm intention). It will be some time around 3 a.m. when the taxi will call for her, her large suitcase and her hand luggage. She decided that she would rather have the Big Goodbye at home, so we shall not go with her to the airport.

I have recently awoken from my night sleep (it is now 4 a.m.) and I was finding it difficult to get back to sleep again. I therefore decided to do this short blog. Mind you, I do often wake up in the middle of the night. When this happens I usually make myself a cup of tea and either do a little writing or play my digital piano with the IEMs in place (In Ear Monitors). I have not made tea this time.

A busy and difficult day lies ahead. I can hear that it is raining, from the pitter-patter on my skylight window. I recently put some weed-and-feed onto my lawn and that needs washing in. Later in the week I shall rake out the dead moss and give it a little after-care. Part of my coping strategy will be not to ignore the small things in everyday life that need to be done. When my first wife left me, I made sure that I ate properly and kept my house reasonably clean and tidy. These things matter. They provide a simple and stable framework in which to adjust to new circumstances and from which to reconstitute one’s concept of self. As a response to strong advice from my doctor, I changed my physical being by losing 20 kg over the course of the past year. I achieved this by managing what and how much I ate, on a daily/weekly basis, and by virtue of will-power (old-fashioned as that term may sound). Over the past 10 months I have focussed effort on the improvement of my physical being; in months ahead I shall shift the spotlight to my psychological well-being. Massaging my self-concept or tweaking my persona is something that should provide me with a modicum of amusement, interest or even satisfaction, at the meta-level, given that I taught psychology for 30 years at my local university!

Currently, I am feeling a little better about things. It is possible that writing up this blog helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings. Bye for now, my dear blogophiles.

As the days grind on, we get closer and closer to the imminent date of her departure. The clearing of the room, the sorting out of stuff, and the throwing away of rubbish all help to mercifully blunt sensitivity. Air freight shipping will have to wait until she knows how much space she has in the room or rooms that will usurp the tag of ‘home’. We shall therefore be faced with a second wave of packing and crating some weeks or months after she has gone. For the time being, it has all been stacked into temporary cardboard boxes in order that we may get some idea of the cubic footage that will be required. The weight of the boxes is incredible. I had no idea she had so many CDs DVDs and books.

Things are vanished into boxes

This morning I went to Staples, a big office supply store in the UK, to get a replacement toner cartridge for my computer printer. At the checkout I waited while a father and his son paid for their goods. The boy looked about 18 and from all the files and folders that they were getting my guess is that he was about to go off to university. I saw the father put his credit card into the reader and this thrust me back to when I had done an almost identical thing when my daughter went off to university. The expected wave of emotion swept over me but it has been happening so much these past two weeks I had little difficulty holding back until I had paid for my stuff and got into the car for the ride home. On the way back I stopped briefly at a supermarket to get a loaf of bread. It is still the school holidays here and as I walked over to the bakery with my handbasket I passed a father doing some shopping with his teenage daughters. Of course, yet again more memories were triggered. Everywhere I turn, there are reminders of past family life together. My only hope is that eventually they will become dull and cease to stimulate sharp memories.

I am finding it very difficult to play piano, guitar, or to sing. I think the simple explanation of that must be that singing and playing music is a very emotional thing to do. Not really what I want right now.