Capital

A productive day at work mainly spent planning for next year. Brian Ng and I are working on a somewhat revised plan for the year for Year 5, based on some perceptive ideas from Ferdinand, and it's taking an interesting shape. One of the challenges is to remember the ups and downs of this year's programme and factor the concerns raised into the new scheme of things. There's a curiously strong tendency to forget what actually took place (almost an impulse) and just recalling the fine detail is a demanding but extremely useful exercise. I've always felt that this dealing with the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day experience of what is really going on in classrooms is where the real action in education is: the pedagogic equivalent of getting one's hands dirty.

After picking up Noi it was off to the hawker centre near Eunos MRT for a plate of hot, tasty curry puffs and a big cup of tea. We are now getting back to our pre-Ramadhan routines, a sort of minor fall from grace, I suppose, but not too sinful.

Then home to another treat: the great VW symphonic play-through continued with the second symphony - A London Symphony. This is my favourite of the symphonies, and up there amongst the VW raves to which every right thinking listener must surely subscribe: Tallis, Lark Ascending, Job. For a start, it's chock full of tunes, real tunes, great tunes, the sort you're humming along to almost on a first hearing and which rapidly become part of your aural consciousness, assuming there is such a thing. And the fact the tunes don't come in anything close to a neat sequence but sort of tumble abundantly in and out of each other, sometimes sort of scurrying through magical harmonic textures only to hide again, keeps the whole thing fresh and somehow unpredictable, no matter how well you know the piece.

And then there are so many examples of great scene painting going on. You are made to visualise the city, and this is a London of great charm and beauty I'm talking of, not the modern metropolis. That description of the slow second movement as Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon (VW's own) is so right, you can taste the fog (in the viola, I think.) But there's also the less attractive underbelly of the city in the music, particularly in the unpredictable sudden floods of those oddly impassioned outbursts, usually led by the strings - like the two louder passages in the slow movement and that bit at the beginning of the final movement that comes out of nowhere, it seems, nailing you to the wall. I think VW saw something under (through? below?) the great capital and centre of empire he walked at the turn of the century. I think he saw Blake's Eternal City and he captured it in music. If this isn't great music, I don't know what is.