By Surprise

One of the trickier features of my work is the way in which an issue requiring time and attention to deal with can blow up out of nowhere, cutting across other demands and intentions, pretty much at any time. This afternoon I suddenly found myself dealing with an administrative task I'd expected I'd have to do quite soon, but I had not expected the deadline to be tomorrow. It got done, but with some small cost to other things that needed doing, and with some slightly larger cost to my enthusiasm for doing things well.

We've built a culture predicated on keeping those who are lucky enough to be in work too busy to be able to do all their work well. This is not wise.

The Year Ahead

Bought my indispensable week-to-a-view desk diary for 2021 today. It's a relief to get hold of it these days as you see fewer and fewer on the shelves. I suppose not that many folks use them in our IT-enabled paradise. Normally I have a bit of a moan at this point about time speeding up, but owing to unforeseen circumstances this last year has felt pretty slow to me. I've just glanced at my battered diary for 2020 and in places there are more crossings-out than entries. And, of course, 2021 lurks deeply uncertainly in a deeply uncertain future. Yikes!

(Just tried to add a link to last year's post about buying my diary for 2020, but the unexpectedly new Blogger interface still won't allow me to insert links. So here it is in full, as evidence of my usual moaning: http://fromafarplace.blogspot.com/2019/09/spinning-even-faster.html .)

To Treasure

Good article in today's Life section of The Straits Times about the esteemed Ramli Sarip. It seems everyone's favourite Mat Rocker is releasing a new album this year. If we can get hold of it on CD it'll be getting some air play in this household, I can tell you. Every Ramli album we've got has proved a keeper.

When I told the Missus about the article she bunged on some live stuff she searched for on-line on her trusty i-Pad and, despite the fact we could only hear it through the tinny i-Pad, it sounded extremely tasty - the sign of a real musician: stuff sounding good when it really has no right to.

If memory serves, we've seen the great man live (really, I mean) three times and he's never been less than entirely, masterfully present in his music. A national treasure - though I'm not sure the nation quite realises that fact.

Still Very Ordinary

We've not even bothered to step out today. Noi decided to bake some bread to go along with the patented oxtail soup that she's been preparing, and she's also made a sort of orange cake that smells of orange in the best possible way. Since she had cunningly made sure she had the ingredients for all the goodies on hand, she announced we would have a day at home and I more than readily complied. In its way the lockdown helped us to an understanding of the pleasures of going absolutely nowhere and we're often quite content to develop our understanding further, as we have today.

All highly satisfactory and deeply restful.

A Perfectly Ordinary Evening

It's been raining here, and pleasantly so, the kind of rain you can happily walk across the car-park in - not nasty rain, not Manchester rain, if you know what I mean. And happily the rain seemed to have kept the crowds in, so it was easy to get a place in the Prata Alley shop, near Clementi Mall. It was my first time there, and won't be my last: the coin prata proved yummy in the extreme, especially for a man who just really fancied some prata, and the teh tarik gajah was of the highest standard. The Missus, by the way, opted for the thosai and was not disappointed.

So why am I relating all these mundane details? Because their sheer ordinariness goes to illustrate a great and abiding truth. There is nothing ordinary about the ordinary for the man, and indeed the woman, who keep their minds and their mouths open, and really don't mind trying something not new in the slightest.

The Eyes Have It

Watched Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit this afternoon. It vies with Chicken Run as my favourite animated movie, and possibly just edges it on account of the wonderfully rendered locations, especially the streets of terraced houses. The gags are uniformly funny, but it's the expressive faces that sell the humour. How does Gromit manage to say so much with those button eyes?

Insight

Richard Williams's unfailingly excellent blog thebluemoment.com is one of the very few music-themed blogs I drop in on regularly. His latest post, dealing with the work of Richard and Linda Thompson in the 70's, is typically informative & enthusiastic and left me feeling a little bit wiser as to the career of one of my favourite artists. It also served as a salutary reminder of the fact that my interest in RT only really blossomed in the late 90's. Mr Williams's mention of the eccentrically titled collection (guitar, vocal), which he helped compile, suddenly made me realise that it was that double album that finally got me into RT, but that was only after a few years of intermittently playing the thing until the light dawned.

The reference to the austerity of the Thompson sound accounting for their lack of popular success struck me as spot-on. Looking back I think that was the problem I had with the work in general. It didn't seek to please in terms of production, as if so assured of its quality it really didn't need to. I'm deeply glad I eventually got the point.

(Since the new, improved Blogger interface resolutely refuses to allow me to insert links, here's a link to the blogpost in question:  https://thebluemoment.com/2020/09/22/those-hard-luck-stories/ .)

Something Gorgeous

Came home to listen to some Duke Ellington. An excellent idea. Wondered why I didn't do this everyday. The CD in question was a nifty collection entitled The Ellington Suites comprising three of his suites written for specific occasions, the recordings stretching from 1959 to 1972.

It's all good (needless to say) but I was knocked sideways by A Single Petal of a Rose, an old favourite, featuring just the Duke on piano with some tasteful bowed bass from Jimmy Woode towards the back end. I'd forgotten just how wonderfully spare the Duke's playing is. There's a bit of ornamentation around the lovely melody, but it remains a bit. Billy Strayhorn, I suppose technically the better player, would have been all guns firing on it, and, much as I love his playing, I don't think that florid approach would do the piece justice.

Something Lost

When I was a little lad I could lose myself in stories. I mean, stories I made up and acted out. Quite effortlessly. Then I lost that ability, around the time I began to think about girls.

That's a huge regret. Somehow the loss reduced me. Growing up made me smaller in certain ways.

The Joys Of The Unfamiliar

I thought I'd find the poems in the Remains of Elmet section of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes familiar, but this hasn't been the case so far - and I'm some seven or eight poems in. I'm wondering if this is because I'm so used to seeing them alongside Fay Godwin's photographs that reading them shorn of the pictures has transformed them for me. Or it could be just a case of a poor memory. Or it could be a case of lazy reading when I first encountered them, meaning I focused on my favourites and didn't pay too much attention to those that didn't immediately render their secrets. Indeed, it occurs to me that I never actually owned the collection but browsed through it whenever I was at Tony's and my exposure to its contents may have been a bit more limited than I assumed as a result.

One thing that has surprised as I've been reading through the Collected is how much I've enjoyed sequences I didn't think would appeal. For example, I must have previously read Adam and the Sacred Nine since it was published in Moortown, a volume I would have claimed to know well. And I assumed that since it didn't do much for me on its initial publication, that I wouldn't find much to enjoy this time around. Yet I found myself responding enthusiastically to every poem, especially those directly about birds, and thinking of them as quite magical evocations of the simple 'being' of the creatures, as in the best of Hughes's animal verse.

I think this points to why I've found myself sticking to the policy of reading books of poetry doggedly in sequence. The rewards of discovery are so powerful. This way the treasure can't remain hidden (unless I'm too dumb to see it. Always a sad possibility, I'm afraid.)