Taking Stock

As January staggers to its conclusion it's a good time for me to assess the success, or otherwise, of my somewhat foolhardy resolution for the New Year, which is no longer quite so new. Feeling quite beat-up as I am at this moment, it's difficult to convince myself that I'm any fitter than I was as 2019 began. But I'm happy to record the fact I managed to hit my target of visiting the gym and kept myself moving on almost every day of the month.

Mind you, there's no shortage of months to negotiate before the year's end. So, as ever, there can be nothing definite about this assessment - which is part of the fun of it all.

Going Cheap

Now watching Eat Well For Less, a programme that combines two of our favourite topics: food and doing things on the cheap. No wonder it's compulsive viewing in this household.


Afterword: I'd written the above before the end of the episode in question. It seemed fairly typical of the series: a very ordinary, likeable family - mum, dad, two youngish daughters - adjusting their domestic arrangements to include more home cooking and a number of alterations to what they might routinely buy from the supermarket to feed themselves. They managed to save more than sixty quid a week with the new stuff and were eating more healthily - so all well and good. Like most of the families featured they were keen to save money, in this case for medical treatment for the mother, for her chemotherapy. Then, at the conclusion of the credits, came a picture of the mum, who'd passed away some time in the year or so after the making of the programme. It was a genuinely powerfully sad moment, and entirely unexpected. I assume the family had approved the airing of the episode as a kind of tribute to her. If so, it was a lovely one in its unaffected, touching simplicity. A reminder of the preciousness of the absolutely ordinary.

Folie A Deux?

Noi is talking about selling one of her rather delightful bone china (a.k.a. china bone) tea sets. She reckons it doesn't speak to her. The funny thing is, I think I know exactly what she means.

The High Life

Found myself in a swanky hotel this afternoon, being treated to and enjoying a High Tea of potentially epic proportions. Fortunately I've learned over the years to restrain myself in such situations and avoid the misery that can ensue from over-estimating the capacity of my stomach. Still I managed to put away a more than reasonable amount.

Yet even whilst doing so I had a distinct awareness that it was the novelty of it all that made it so enjoyable. In a way I pity those for whom such luxury is routine. What do they have to look forward to?

Extremes

I'm pleased that, quite some time ago now, I bought the big box of the Complete Piano Sonatas of Beethoven with Daniel Barenboim tickling the ivories. It's a treasury of extraordinary riches, so much so that I haven't come close to doing justice to listening to the contents, despite giving the CDs therein pretty regular spins.

Just lately I've developed a different way of approaching the sonatas having decided that just spinning a CD when I felt like it didn't really work. I now decide on a specific sonata, quite at random actually, and arrange to listen when I can concentrate fully. I don't let the CD in question run on to material that follows, but ensure I'm fully focused up to the last notes. This way I find I can just about cope with the extravagance of it all.

Earlier this evening, for example, Noi had popped out to see one of her chums for a bit of exercise at a pool somewhere so I banged on the No 7 in D, Opus 10, No 3 and, my goodness, it was a reminder of just how varied a single sonata can be. To be honest, I usually can't figure out at all for most of the sonatas how the various movements are supposed to comprise a unitary whole. In this case, it began with what struck me as a close to manic Presto opening, incredibly virtuosic, and quite lovely in little bits, and then abruptly switched to a slow movement that started as if directly referencing the depths of depression. The full twelve minutes of it was spell-binding, and the Minuetto following was also lovely in its own way. But the last movement was, again, oddly disconnected from what had just preceded it, to these poor ears at least.

What I am sure of, though, is that the strange bi-polarity of the first two movements wasn't just in my imagination. Brilliant certainly, but disturbingly so.

The Real Thing

I've been making slow progress in The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath, and most happily so. I thought I was reasonably familiar with her earlier stuff but now realise I've encountered hardly anything from 1956 - 57 in any kind of intense reading before, and since this is where this Collected begins, shoving the pre-1956 Juvenilia to the back of the text, this is where I am, and in no hurry to move on any time soon. The verse here is knotty, gnarled, packed with meaning, and very obviously influenced by Ted Hughes. At times it sounds so like Hughes it forces a kind of double-take, but it's also very obviously not just imitation. Plath seems to possess and be possessed by TH, yet there's something so assured in the poems, and something so prescient, that it's as if her voice is whispering behind it.

It's impossible to read a line like, One day I'll have my death of him (from Pursuit) without a bit of a shudder. Amazing, also, the speed with which she picks up northern idioms and wrestles them into new shapes.

Unreal

I remember as a kid reading Orwell's 1984 and experiencing a powerful sense of something approaching panic, reading about the idea of the Party altering history to suit its own agenda. Today I felt an echo of that anxiety reading an article about the victims of on-line conspiracy theorists, folk who've had their lives ruined as a result of entirely, and very obviously, false stories. The segment about the parent of a six-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook massacre being hounded as a hoaxer actually came close to provoking tears of sadness, and a kind of rage. 

'There is just no more truth, there is just what’s trending on Twitter,' he says. Stop the world, please, I want to get off.

A Small Mystery

Noi is still dealing with an unpleasant cough that started back in New Zealand. It seems viral in origin and I'm surprised that somehow or other I haven't succumbed. I suppose that once upon a time I took good health for granted, but that's certainly not the case these days. The happy fact that I've not been in any real sense ill for quite some time and I've been free of aches and pains for some months is cause enough for mild celebration and distinct thankfulness on a daily basis.

So I make note of some recent problems with cramp in my legs in no spirit of complaint, but rather as a reminder of my good luck. If this is all I have to deal with, then I'm happy with the occasional few minutes of discomfort. Must say though, I wish I could figure out what causes my nether regions to stir themselves to revolt in this manner as I can't pin down any kind of obvious pattern.

Uncertainties

After we got back from New Zealand I put the Collected Fiction of Lu Xun to one side for a while. Partly this was due to suddenly having more stuff to deal with and partly because I wasn't so familiar with the stories from the second short story collection Lu Xun published, Hesitation I think it's called, and began to find them slightly harder going than the earlier better-known classics, despite their obvious excellence. However, I've regained more momentum in the last few days and am now approaching the end of this collection.

The story I've just read, In Memoriam, seems to me to some degree typical of this period of the writer's work. Very downbeat, to the point of real despair. Painful to read, in the best sense. In some ways obvious in its effects - an in-your-face portrait of a failing marriage - yet in some respects puzzling, at least for this reader. I know that something is being said relating to gender within Chinese culture, or at least that culture as it manifested itself to LX at the time of writing, and I know that in some ways this is a story about Romantic possibilities. But I can't quite grasp where those ways lead.

I love being in this state of sort-of-confusion over a text. Being knocked sideways, but not being quite sure why. There's the pleasure of positively wanting to reread the story and the exciting uncertainty that a rereading won't prove illuminating allied to the certainty that the impact will be as strong, if not stronger, than the first time round. Of course, it's satisfying to feel one has grasped the essentials of a poem or play, or novel, or story, but that's so often accompanied by an odd sense of diminishment.

Remembrance

Today marks the anniversary of Dad's death. Unfortunately the day has been mildly soured by the on-going saga of my fraught relations with Singtel. Fortunately for us all I haven't the energy to go into any details as to what transpired between myself and that remarkable organisation in the late afternoon. And with even greater fortune, thinking of Dad inevitably reminded me of a depth of decency and calm I can only aspire to, but that very aspiration helped lead me to some kind of equilibrium. For now, at least.