Gr!

I am exhausted after a weekend of doing mostly nice and mostly self-inflicted things about which I cannot therefore complain. I am hoping to write about some of it here.

I am going grrr because I couldn't make it to the lunchtime concert today (for perfectly valid work reasons, I should add). I was already a bit engrumped about this as Friday's performers chose to put a ~70 minute programme in a 50-minute slot and I had to walk out after two of the three Beethoven violin sonatas they were doing. The church is perfectly nice about people doing this, indeed Jana (the vicar) made an announcement to this very effect, but it still feels a bit bad to do so and I would very much prefer to avoid it. But I cannot go to these concerts and just vanish for half the afternoon: there has to be some balance between my desire to be at the concert and the fact that I am meant to be at work for some quite large chunk of the day too! :)

• While I am griping about the Friday concert - this was going to be a separate entry but, what the H*ll - the balance was, or seemed to me, very much too far in the piano's favour. OK it might be my old and increasingly defective hearing, or I may have unluckily sat in a very bad place. But what it seemed was that the piano, with its lid fully open, was aimed right at my head and delivering nothing quieter than mf, whereas the violin was going off up into the church roof and never really getting back down. I've experienced this before with this player and not with other performers so, while I am trying to be nice, I do feel that something was a bit wrong somewhere - I was basically hearing loud piano solos with a rather distant violin accompaniment. The violinist's biog note talks about her silvery tone and her rejection of flashiness - which a cynic might read as not such a strong player - but whichever is the case, someone should tell the pianist. Or her. Or I should get me ears fixed. Whatever.
• Note that I am not naming the performers. Musicians have a hard enough time without amateur critics chucking their oar in too: I'd hate for a quick google on this lady's name to lead to people finding my b*tching about her - others can sort that out. And she is, I know, a fine player, and the pianist too - I just wish I could have heard them both properly. Gah!!

So that's a load of grumpinosity. On the other hand, back on Monday, the sun was shining and me, my MP3 player, my teeny weeny computer and my lunch went and sat near a fountain in the Barbican for a bit. I listened to excitingly random things and finished reading - on the PDA - the rather good Terry Pratchett Discworld novel Wintersmith. So not all bad, which is why I have gone back and altered the title so it is only half a grrr.