This blog

Sometimes I go off into a little reverie about this blog, and how much I like writing it, and how nice it is when people comment on it, and so on.

Then I think about all the pieces I'd like to write, and those that I've got half-finished, or more-than-half-finished, and how great they will (/might) be one day. I get quite into them, figuring out particular angles and turns of phrase that I think will please you, or at least me. At times I have so many ideas that it's as if there's almost too much choice, except that that's fine because there's really no such thing as "too much choice" - it's just a load more opportunities fizzing around, which is great.

So I have this little conversation with myself about the whole thing, and my writing, and maybe a photo or two, and how - perhaps, if I'm very lucky - I'll have written something that, when I go back and reread it weeks, months or years later, I might actually enjoy it, or even go, "gosh, this is actually OK you know".

And then the bus reaches my stop, or the tube train rushes into my station or whatever, and I snap out of it: I'm back.

And I haven't written a bloody word.

And now I'm here ...

... outside Islington Town Hall. Ah the happy memories.

Oh hang on, there aren't any. Not of that particular place. Ho hum.


- MobileHenceTerse

Location:Upper St,Islington,United Kingdom

I'm blogging on the

... bus.

This is most exciting. I'm writing and sending this blogulistic entity from a big red London omnibus. Hold very tight please! (Ding ding!)


- MobileHenceTerse

Location:Holloway Rd,Islington,United Kingdom

nidbaabeth™ - a sanity-saving new concept

Oh thank goodness, a claimed neologism that doesn't turn out to mean 400 things in Danish or have been bagsied by 976 other bloggers six years before I thought I'd thought of it!

nidbaabeth™: No, I don't blog about absolutely bl**dy everything that happens!

You read it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

I shall return to this. (Please see also the FIQ. Thank you.)

I had also considered:

ntidbaabeth™: No, Tamsin, I don't blog about absolutely bl**dy everything that happens!

... but, let's be honest, it is a poor thing beside the glory that is nidbaabeth™.

Thank you for visiting. Vogel out.

I really ought to write something productive and interesting for this blog and not just poke fun at infelicitous language in news stories and other easy, lazy stuff.

Please see header line. Yes. Yes indeed.

The Strawberry Yoghurt FIQ

Welcome to this Strawberry Yoghurt FIQ. Please take a seat, a small pile of napkins, and some of these delicious root vegetable crisps from Pret à Manger. There you are. Lovely. Mr Thompson will shortly be along with a pleasant beverage for you. In the meantime kindly proceed with the FIQs.

Why is this blog secret?

It isn't.

Well, why haven't you told me about it?

Ah. Because I didn't know if you'd like it: indeed I worried that you'd actively disapprove, and think less of me for having it. It is, after all, a pretty self-indulgent thing to have. I mean, I quite like it, myself, but I am not exactly proud of it per se; and I could never really say, "hey, you must read this, it's great."

Not long after I embarked on this yogological journey I was talking to someone whose opinions I usually really rather respect. I mentioned blogging, though not apropos of this one: probably Tom Reynolds or Dr Crippen or something. I was quite taken aback by their very negative reaction which was - to paraphrase a little - that it's all a self-indulgent waste of time, they couldn't imagine why anyone would ever want to write or read one, it could never be any good, and so on. So, not overwhelmingly enthusiastic, you may note. After this I wasn't in a huge hurry to blurt out something starting along the lines of "hey, guess what?" and I suppose this has stuck a bit.

There's a bit more to it than that but this'll have to do for version 1. Essentially, I didn't tell you about this blog because I'm still not sure that I'm not slightly ashamed of it.

Why do you have a blog?

Dunno. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I've always liked to write and never seemed to have time. Since I got my first PDA (HP Jornada 450 of blessed memory) ages ago in 2001 or something, though, it's opened up some little chinks of time, for example when commuting, that I can use to write in. This has led to my building up a small stock of pieces that could one day become blog entries - if I ever get round to them!

My Dear Kiddiwinks, well a majority of them anyway, have also been most encouraging and supportive. So, I done it.

So you think you're A Writer do you?

Ah no. I think that I am someone who likes writing, and afterwards likes reading what I have written, or at least some of it. I am well aware that a Real Writer possesses about ninety-three characteristics that I lack.

What do you like to write about?

Obviously there's all sorts of nonsense in here but the key thing, the thing that got me going, is accounts of travel and other odds and ends (perhaps music and orienteering, the odd interesting weekend) that I like to read about again. So in a sense it is just a glorified diary.

What was your first such piece of writing?

Memory plays interesting games with this but I think the first thing I wrote in recent times, with the idea of it being some kind of travel diary, was about being in North Yorkshire when Lottie was on ProCorda North. This was, oh, yonks ago. I still haven't posted it anywhere but I still intend to do so!

As far as I recall I started writing it because I was (mostly) on my own, doing touristy things while Lottie was busy, and I wanted to capture more of the experience than I could with just photographs. With the passing years my memory is not actually improving so this becomes more important.

And your first actual blog entry?

That was on this blog's LiveJournal predecessor and was about the simple pleasures of watching football on the telly. A copy, for better or for worse, may now be seen here.

You writing about football? Ha!!

I know, I know, but give me a break: a cat can look at a king, no? And anyway it wasn't exactly a formal match report.

What's with the Strawberry Yoghurt thing?

Well, I had to call it something. And I do like strawberry yoghurt. Really. And "Fat Sad Middle-Aged Bloke with Various Annoying Obsessions" seems a little lacking in poetry; and indeed, judging by some of the other blogs I've seen, I imagine it's already taken.

So this is not an entirely serious, pure and high-minded fruit'n'dairy-product review site?

Lamentably, no.

And the anonymity?

I think I cover this in the "About Me" bit. As I explain there, it's partly work-related; it's partly to not make life too easy for lazy Googlers; and so on. It's not exactly a nuclear-hardened level of security but I like it. I also, I suppose, like having a spare identity to play with.

And the ranting?

Rants lower BP, lessen risk of brain exploding, maybe occasionally help work through things. Or not.

And the ranting about Virgin businesses?

More to come.

Why Vogel von Neustadt?

More to come. But why not?

So are you really an ex-cavalry officer of aristocratic birth, raised in some unspecified but probably German-speaking country somewhere in The Middle, where coast is somewhat scarce but mountains ten a pfennig?

Er ... Yes?

And yet at other times you seem to attempt to claim to be a northern working-class son of toil, whose Dad's generation was the first in the male line of descent not to go down t'pit, eee 'appen?

Er ... Yes. Odd, isn't it?

Who is Sprengel?

More to come.

What is the name of the Imp of the Right Shoulder?

More to come.

Who are Tamsin and Colin?

More to come.

Your blog seems rather lightweight?

Yup.

And doesn't really deal with the Bigger Issues in Life?

Nope.

But where is The Profundity?

Erm. Friern Barnet? Is it that new wine bar?

The Angst?

Lost me there, guv

Do you really expect your readers to believe that your life is as jolly and straightforward as you portray it?

Yeah.

Didn't you mean this to be an FAQ?

No.

Oh go on, then, I'll bite: <sigh> why, pray, is this called an FIQ?

Frequently Imagined Questions

How should one pronounce FIQ?

Hmmmm – I suppose it comes out sounding a bit fick?

Talking of pronunciation, what's this thing about Reveille?

More to come.

Why do your children have titles, each one in a different language?

The European aristocracy is jolly complicated.

Do you actually read it?

More to come.

Photos

More to come.

Mr Thompson?

More to come.

Mrs Thompson?

More to come.

An ting?

Ah yes. You have Althea and Donna to thank for that.

Links-I-Liked

So, farewell then:

• Living with Bert - very amusing, sometimes tinged with a touch of, erm, affectionate bitterness or something. Not updated since 15th April 2008. Your guess is as good as mine. I miss it.
• Punclox: inexplicable group writing by Wretched Young Persons™. Do not let your auntie read it. Well that's what it used to say. However, your auntie cannot now read it anyway so that risk is past; indeed only members of the Punclox Inner Circle™ can read it as it is no longer public. Where on Earth will confused people go looking for Donnie Darko hints now? The world is a duller place without Punclox and I salute it (attempts to make complicated saluting gesture but falls over).

I have removed these two from Links-I-Like and I have officially recategorized them as Links-I-Liked. They are now to be found in storage at Wookey Hole caves.

Blogging

I seem very short of time at the moment, one way or another, and this blog is getting neglected. This is annoying as there are quite a few things about which I'd like to write. I will have to try to reorganize myself and make time somehow. I apologize to readers for the shoddy service.

Maybe I need to have another little crisis about what gets written up in full, what gets truncated into sketchy notes, and what gets dropped altogether: this got me through the St Anne's Gig-A-Blog backlog quite well and might serve for other topics. Watch this space.

They're dreadful truisms but it doesn't mean they're not true:

• Striving for perfection is sometimes (often/always) the enemy of getting it done at all (yes blatant and bad paraphrase I know but hey)^[1].
• if you are trying to write you really need to write something every day, whether or not you feel like it. Otherwise your writing muscles start to atrophy.

It does not help that I am currently surrounded by malfunctioning computer equipment, at work and home both, and every time I try to do something ... anything ... either something else breaks, or I break the internet, or the end falls off ... gah! This is known as the Reverse Midas Touch.

Note:

1. Oh alright I knew I couldn't let myself get away with that. Bl**dy nitpicker. Here we go: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, Voltaire, from Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) "The best is the enemy of the good", but often rendered as "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Which is kinda sorta nearly what I nearly said, n'est-ce pas?

Gig-a-Blog-a-gone-a-bit-orf™ (various, St Anne & St Agnes inter alia)

Oh dear. The whole Gig-a-Blog™ thing has got a bit difficult to sustain.

[A long and exceptionally boring discussion is here omitted. Phew, eh?]

Executive summary:

• I've chucked out a load of half-finished ones which had lost their way. One or two might have been interesting but none were really worth saving, now matter how wonderful were the concerts that they represented (or rather, failed to represent).
• One had a proper disaster, of the many paragraphs-lost-for-ever-sort. Before, it was on its way to being usable, but afterwards it was very much otherwise.
  
• I'm going to try to rescue a couple that are almost-OK.
  
• I'm not going to try to keep the Gig-a-Blogging™ at its previous level. Life's too short to risk letting a happy diversion start to feel like a millstone. Well mine is anyway.
• I've been to loads of lovely concerts about which I did or didn't write. I will be going to loads more lovely concerts, about which ditto ditto blah etc. It's not possible to reach any conclusion regarding those that don't get into the blog. They're victims of my time management and memory: it's got nothing at all to do with whether or not I liked them!
• My idea about the original procedure for St Anne's Gig-a-Blogging™ was that it was just what I wrote during the concert and on that evening's commute home ... if I felt like it. Back to the Rule, d'you think?

I think that's pretty much it. Thank you for listening. Vogel out.

Vogel's a bit fargled: blogapology

I'm sorry that this blog's gone so quiet at the moment. There are couple of other things on which I've had to concentrate, and still do, and I just can't find the time to sit down and really write, or even edit, for a decent-length session. Avebury Day Two is the next big or biggish thing I want to do, but I reckon that it'll still be a fortnight or more before I can sort that out, even though it's very close to being finished.

In other news, I've been to several very nice concerts at St Anne's, played in a Rite of Spring with Salomon, and weathered various work crises. (It's unlikely that I'll get time to write separately about all, or maybe any, of those things. Two very different summer holidays will, though, get wroted up. I hope.)

My breadmaking career continues to flourish. I spent a while consolidating my (very advanced) skills in making straightforward white or wholemeal loaves then decided to branch out a bit. My first less-straightforward attempt, a five-seeds wholemeal loaf, wasn't 100% successful: it looked a bit, er, odd and collapsed, and seemed somewhat dense in parts (aha, yes, the image of its creator, thank you so much) though to be fair it still tasted great. My guess is that the yeast was a bit unenthusiastic - it was from a part-used sachet that I'd resealed, but perhaps not quickly or well enough? Oh well. Straight back on the horse (no Tamsin, it's a metaphor) and Attempt 2, while still not actually flyaway-fluffy, was much more how I was hoping it would be.

Emboldened by this I went on to a white loaf with apricot and almond and this was a truly delicious first-time success. Indeed I made another of these loaves on Sunday and that was very nice too. I am far too timid to progress through Mr Panasonic's cookbook any faster than this current crawl, but that's fine. I love my breadmaker!

This blog ...

... is comin' like a Ghost Blog.

Sorry, I have loads of stuff I want to write, loads of half-written stuff to finish off and post. I just don't at present have any of the Magic Copingness which is required to get any of it done right now. Watch this space.

Blog Service Update

• Thank you for visiting this blog.
• We apologize for the delay in posting anything interesting.
• Your readership is important to us. You are held in a queue ... blah blah blah

OK so it's not a very sustainable metaphor, sorry. But my point is just that I am up to my eyes in other stuff at the moment, and the blog is suffering a bit.

Since it's essentially just a self-indulgence - aren't they all? - then it's difficult to prioritize it that highly when too much is going on elsewhere. I mean it's not that I don't like the blog (usually), in fact sometimes I actually quite love it, in a weird way, but it might just need to take a bit of a back seat for a while. In particular, as discussed ad nauseam elsewhere, in 32 days, on 11th April, I leave the news editing job, and before then I have much work to do to hand it over in good nick. And this is just looking at the sitting-at-computer stuff, before I even think about family, work, playing etc etc, all of which have had their moments lately.

As I've said before, the blog is mostly written on the train to and from work, though some of the editing and the actual posting require me to be sitting at a "proper" computer. Even the writing time on the train is currently being eroded as there's competition for that, up to 16th March, a subject to which I may come back. Or not.

So the bottom line is that I'm sorry if the blog is a bit feeble at the moment but I have lots of nice things on which I am still working, albeit patchily, and more will be posted sooner or later, probably later. Till then thank you for your indulgence.

As apology for the bloguselessness, and just in case you were wondering, yes Tamsin I do have a photo of a nice-looking, happy man surrounded by a blur of sparrows in Paris a year and a half ago. This is a commercial setup in that the sparrow specialist gives the punter food - and thus a skein of sparrows - then takes their photo with their own camera, in return for financial reward. But it was still a nice thing to see and I imagine that the nice and happy-looking man was pleased with his photo, which was taken from much more in front than mine. It's not such a good photograph technically, but for reasons I cannot fully articulate I really love it: it makes me smile to look at it.

More Backlog-a-Blog™

Hello again. I am sorry that blogological enterprise round here has slowed down a bit recently. I have a deadline coming up - the last ever of this exact type; I have Other Stuff™ going on, plenty of it: I just don't at the moment have the time I need to finish and post things. But I will.

For the time being, I was wondering if by any chance you were just thinking "I do wish Vogel would post a photo of a rather lovely great big black bee on a passion flower in Laroque des Albères a couple of years ago"? If so, imagine, your luck is in, because I just happen to have sorted one out for you. I do hope you enjoy it.

Normal, if it could ever be termed that, service will be resumed as soon as possible. Thank you for your tolerance. And indeed for the loan of your garlic crusher and slippers.

Jabnaas - just a blog not an authoritative source

Or, how to learn to relax and go with the jabnaas.

JABNAAS - just a blog not an authoritative source. Since shortly after its first known appearance in December 2007 it has tended to be used in all-lowercase, thus: jabnaas.

Usage:

1. To remind the reader that a blog is, after all, just a blog. Unless it makes very clear and verifiable claims to some sort of authority, it is not to be taken too seriously on such subjects as:

• Meissen porcelain
• French painting
• Bartók’s string quartets
• Satellites
• Ant and Dec
• William Harvey
• Anything at all

2. To remind the blogger of much the same thing: to wit, it will not directly and immediately cause the Thames to freeze over, and ninety-six species of butterfly to become extinct, if you leave some fact unverified or indeed unknown. In fact, it will cause not even the merest ripple in the basic rate of income tax should you get Ant's birthday or Dec's shoe size wrong, and not bother to check it, and it then stays wrong for a decade or more till someone with real OCD checks, or someone who knows happens along, or maybe Ant and/or Dec pop in to say hello and enlighten blogger and blogreader alike.

So: Jabnaas - leave it, get over it, it doesn't matter that much. (Yes Vogel, pay attention, I am talking to you dear boy.)

You see, ever since the tragic disappointment of "blognorance", I've been racking my several remaining brain cells trying to think of a witty neologism, partly as a shorthand for use in the blog, and partly (well more so really, to be honest) to try to make myself feel better over the previous debacle and the 83 gun-jumping swine (now there's an interestingly mixed metaphor) who have selfishly and irresponsibly used my word, without a care for my feelings, before, er, I thought of it.

I wanted, as I say, a witty neologism but jabnaas is what I got instead. Oh well. It'll have to do. Maybe I will grow to love it, like Brussels sprouts. I sort-of concluded that acrostic or acronym (or whatever - jabnaas!) was probably the only way to go, short of just plucking a word absolutely out of thin air, because all the cleverisms like blognorance or bloglectful had been bagsied years ago. And anyway there's only so much pleasure to be had from flogging a dead horse and this one seems pretty much all flogged out, poor old thing.

I did look at some other possibilities:

• jabasynteb
  just a blog about strawberry yoghurt not the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• jabnteb
  just a blog not the Encyclopædia Britannica
• jabnae
  just a blog not an encyclopædia
• jabnarf
  just a blog not a reference library

- and their fouler-mouthed variants (cover your ears, Tamsin):

• jabasyntefb
• jabntefb
• jabnafe
• jabnafrf

- but as you see they are all a bit rubbish (OK, quite a lot rubbish), and jabnaas, the best of a bad bunch, at least has the advantage that it is almost pronounceable, that it sounds vaguely funny, and that it might, seen in the right light, be a slightly threatening description in some English dialect of, perhaps, a medical procedure of some sort – who knows?

Anyway, for better or worse, jabnaas it now is. I intend to refer frequently to this page in the course of trying to save myself from a nervous breakdown while obsessing about how much to put in about the West Coast Main Line or (depending on definitions) which car · I · owned · first. Jabnaas.

As of right now, Googling it does not work. Hurrah, huzzah, a half-holiday and a commemorative basket for the peasant children.

Remember: jabnaas - just a blog not an authoritative source.

You know it makes sense. (Perhaps)

I know it makes sense. (Almost definitely.)

Ant and Dec - well, they probably don't care. Hah - more fools them.

Jabnaas!!

Backblog

Service is a wee bit slow at present: sorry. I've written a few little things but I need some time to finish off, sort out photos, and the like, and this "time" is what I don't currently have, hence the backlog.

I am having a Trumpet News Deadline Crisis (TNDC) right now but once it is over - in a day or two, nervous breakdowns permitting - I will try to get back to the blog a bit.

Note that the current TNDC is the second-and-a-halfth-last ever: I have another one due February 1st but after that I hand the half-cooked file, betwixt deadlines, to my successors. along with the web pages, and lots of goodwill and positive thought-beaming.

Yay and woo, ahem yes. It's now 123 days to go.

Onwards and upwards!

Blognorance, and the Software of the Blogging; the splendidnosity of the technical installation

Blognorance

Dammit! I thought I had perhaps invented the term "blognorance" but Googling it brings up 83 references already. Probably about 82 of those people think they invented it too: indeed you can even see such a claim in one of the teeny random Google summaries ("we show you bits of random misleading text in order to save you time on getting randomly confused on the interwebnet - get randomly confused faster and better on one page!")

Sigh. Is there nothing new under the sun?
(Answer = no, lard boy, there is not.)

Software

Othergates: Windows Live Writer, despite its being a Micro$oft product, is something I have rather liked. Now, however, I can no longer save drafts to the online blogging server computer box device: it says it's saving a draft but it actually publishes it, which is a bit dirty-washing-in-public, if you ask me; oh you didn't, well never mind. (Update on 1st January: they have fixed this so save-draft-to-server now once more works like a charm. Hurrah.)

In the profound depths of my ignorance (would've-been blognorance, tsk) I do not know whether this is WLW or the server side playing up, nor do I know how I would find out. But one thing that strikes me is that my depending only on WLW or the web interface is going to help preserve this state of ignorance well past its sell-by date because I have no alternative to check against.

So ... what other blog client PC software, that would work well with this blog, should I look at? It doesn't have to be free, it does have to be good. Idiot-proof would be handy, too, as I work in computers and am therefore disgracefully and utterly rubbish with them. All suggestions gratefully read, and rewarded with chocolate where practicable and affordable. (Exceptions may apply, offer not available in all territories, your mileage may vary, close cover before striking.)

Note: I also did not invent "othergates", though I love it very much. I am pretty sure, though, that I know who did: it was my slowly mutating, interesting and amusing (and occasionally worrying) friend Verlaine from LiveJournal and before that from Monochrome, eee them were t'days. But if you think you invented "othergates" please do not hesitate not to write and tell me about it, ever.

... Update: of course, I am wrong, and it was an older word that went out of favour. Maybe Verlaine has reintroduced it? Sigh - I don't know, and certainly don't have time to research it. Isn't it annoying the way almost everything you "know" turns out, sooner or later, to be incorrect?

Splendidnosity of the technical installation

Some nice chaps are drilling holes at the office. Eventually this will lead - next week I think - to the installation of permanent LCD projectors for the seminar rooms. This in turn leads to the death - three rousing cheers - of the practices of grovelling around on the floor, running cable, installing safety strips and other bl**dy ludicrous wastes of time. I know it sounds trivial but I have spent HOURS - not one of them pleasurable, satisfying or worthwhile - doing this over the last almost-decade and it's a great pleasure to think that we will in future be perhaps just that tiny bit more professional and sorted. This is all the initiative of Jonathan, IT geezer for the cancer folk next door, and I would hug him were it not likely to be embarrassing. Yup, yup and yuppity yoooo!

Influence-o-blog™

The splendid fiddleist Rupert Luck (1, 2) wrote very nicely to ask if he could quote from this blog. I am absolutely bowled over with flatterization (or is it flatternity) that someone should wish to do so. Presumably he will have to avoid letting on that it was written by a knuckle-dragging brass-player who cannot count over ten without shoes and socks off and who occasionally wears (metaphorically speaking) a Pickelhaube with semi-comedic intent while editing. But hey.

Clearly my master-plan is working and this blog is becoming massively influential. It is now only a matter of time before I have strawberry yoghurt manufacturers coming grovelling to me, begging to be allowed to buy me out or to bribe me, before I bankrupt them with my scathing reviews. Muahahaha, as they say, ahahah.

Hubris punished

I am pretty annoyed right now.

Having been told last night of someone being nice about this blog I suppose I was probably feeling smug and deserved punishing.

As I think I have mentioned before, nearly all of this blog is written on my HP Ipaq PDA while commuting. This morning I was "working" on some more of the Ingestre Pavilion stuff (1, 2) which is somewhat overdue for fettling and display, it now being more than two months after its marked shelf-life, oops.

I got an idea which I was quite enjoying writing about, indeed so much so that I skipped swimming (fool) and continued working on it through breakfast, writing pretty continuously from 7.00 to about 8.20. I should not be immodest as it clearly invites more punishment but I was really quite "into it" (whatever that may mean) and even chuckled once or twice at my own scintillating wit. Fool, Vogel, fool.

At 8.20 I tried to save it and encountered a problem with Word on my PDA which has happened annoyingly often recently, and it would not save. I have a workaround for this so I implemented the said workaround and then found to my horror that I had suffered a Procedural Accuracy Excursion and that every word I had written had vanished.

At this point, I was not at all happy.

I am well aware that it is only writing, that it does not really matter, that this trifling accident has not affected worldwide starvation or persecution, gun control, the next Olympics, or even the price of strawberry yoghurt. Despite this effort to take several deep breaths and then several more, and retain some sense of perspective, I am really quite annoyed. I don't usually get so enthusiastic about writing something that it would keep me going like that. Ironically, less enthusiasm would have saved it (in both senses) as with the usual interruptions I would have kept having to save (aha) the file and would thus have encountered the problem earlier or even several times - I could simply not have destroyed the entire document with one mistake.

I have been working in or with computers for around thirty years and the sort of baby mistake I made is the sort of thing that makes me sigh at the naivety of users, as long as they are not me.

Despite the unimportance of what has happened I do feel a sneaking sympathy with the unfortunate Stephen Thrasher, he of the "laptop helpdesk tape" that went round the world in a trice some years ago and was much included in songs and the like. "And everything I've been working on for the past two ********* ****** years of my life is gone!" Poor Mr Thrasher. I've only lost a few pages.

A mature attitude would call for me to say that I will simply rewrite it and that it will be better the second time round, a well-worn writers' cliche if ever I heard one. Unfortunately I do not have this mature attitude and am still busy being angry, especially as there is really only the one person with whom I can be angry, stand up Vogel. As for writing it out again - well, I don't know. I felt fairly inspired while I was doing it. I am not sure I can recreate that nor that my rather hopeless memory will be much use in recapturing the feel. I now have a day's work to do and plenty else to worry about. I am reminded of the truly, deeply appallingly dreadful words of the song MacArthur Park concerning cakes, rain and recipes. (If you do not know them please look it up somewhere. They are so dire that I will not quote them here, even in the extreme of rage which I now embody.)

So, to summarize: bother.

Blog on official go-slow ... plus Gig-a-Blog-in-passing™ (Haydn Chamber Orchestra, St John's Wood Parish Church)

I now need to devote a serious chunk of time to the screaming nightmare that is my trumpet editing job. (More on this some other time, perhaps.) As a result, there might be less going on here for a bit. There are a few pieces more or less done and nearly ready to post - mainly St Anne & St Agnes Gig-a-Blogs™, and a few firm ideas for things I want to write about, but these will be appearing gradually rather than, er,  all in one strand (as the deeply unpleasant and unrepeatable joke puts it).

I currently have rather a lot on at work, and also imminent are a Salomon Orchestra concert and a trip oop t'North to retrieve my dear Mama from those icy wastes and return her safely to the balmy shores of, ah, Chichester.

So I am a bit of a stretched-many-ways bunny (eeeuuuwww nasty mental image) at present and even the time it takes to put blog entries up can be difficult to find. And yes I still write them mostly on the Tube or on the Wagn railway (or whatever they are calling it this week) but putting them up and making them nice (or nice-ish) can take a wee bit of time, though not always. So I must ask my many thousands (hem hem) of enthusiastic readers to please bear with me till I find a bit more of the said time.

The good news in all this is that I do sort-of get a couple of days off. The trip to Northumberland is simply too long to just drive there and turn straight around, unless in emergency, which this is not. So I have taken Thursday and Friday off and I will drive up there after work on Wednesday night. We can then do touristy things and go out for nice meals on those two days before the Saturday, when we'll bid a regretful farewell to the lovely village and head for Chichester (which is quite a long way). The bad news at that point is that I cannot then stay the night - there is orienteering on the Sunday morning in Ally Pally and it would be a huge shame to miss it, and then there's a Salomon rehearsal in the afternoon anyway. This means that when we hit Chichester on the Saturday I will certainly stay for a cuppa or two and make sure Mum is OK but then I really have to drive back, no matter how little I feel like it! Ah well, it is a small price to pay for a long weekend in an exceedingly  nice neck of the woods.

In other (brief) news: an excellent Haydn Chamber Orchestra concert in St John's Wood last night. I was very very excited and pleased because my wife, Mrs von Neustadt to you, came along, which is not usual and was very much appreciated. I played in Brahms Symphony No 1, which was great. (I used to detest Brahms symphonies, but they seem to have grown on me, along with whitening hair and several stone in extra weight.) However the actual reason I was there was the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I couldn't bear to think of not being in an HCO concert containing this most perfect of works, even though the trumpet part is notable for its really very sparse writing. (Goak here.) Despite this terrible oversight by Ben (yeah right, we were on first name terms) it affects me more than most other music. It was played utterly fabulously by my friend Keith Maries (odd link, yeah I know) and gorgeously sung by Allan Clayton (somewhat rough link, sorry, could find no better) whom I loved though Deb was (slightly) less taken with him. Something about his vibrato in the Dirge, which I am one day (when I have time) going to obsessively compare on x different recordings till I see what she means. I thought it was wonderful, vibrato and all. Tsk. The conductor was the highly wonderful Robin Ticciati who though seemingly about 11 (from where I am sitting anyway) has a very, very wise musical head on those youthful shoulders and clearly will go spectacularly far. Oh and Mr Clayton looks engagingly much like a Hobbit, which I feel can only be a very good thing.

Oddly, the concert flyer names Robin and Allan but not Keith. I find this surprising - I wouldn't buy a recording of it (and the Lord knows I have bought plenty) with an anonymous horn player. Oversight or policy? Your guess, my guess > equal worth.

Aside: the Serenade is the only piece of music where I find it necessary to pronounce the punctuation, thus: Serenade for Tenor Comma Horn and Strings, although I am not sure how common is the misunderstanding which I am ostensibly trying to avoid. Maybe, like so much else I say and do, it is just a joke which is starting to wear a bit thin. Or maybe I really did hear it the wrong way the first time: I am not sure. The number of people who "get" this may in any case be vanishingly small.  

Oh and we did the Brahms on interesting German/Austrian rotary-valve trumpets, because my good friend and 1st trumpet bossman John Parker likes them and has two. I played John's Monke Bb and he played his incredibly exquisite Schargerl C. Great fun, weird, educational, etc. We do this quite often: I like it.

Afterwards we went to a very nice party at Phil and Mourijn's, which I enjoyed. I had a great chat with people I hardly knew, about jazz, coincidentally enough a subject I hardly know. But hey. Suddenly after yet more splendid chatoidalness (basically, everyone we know was there) I realized that I was going to fall over quite soon, and so I went home and Deb followed a while later, which was all very fine and civilized.

And that's it for now. More soonish, but please don't hold your breath. :)

Do I do any work?

Yes, I do.

I was slightly distressed to hear that one of my many thousands (hem hem) of readers had commented that it looks like I don't do anything except blog all day. (Yes I am probably paraphrasing for dramatic effect).

I was a little put out by this but looking back I can see how you could think so.

For the record, nearly everything I write is done on a little Ipaq PDA while I am commuting. It gets posted at all sorts of odd times, true, but that's just because I have had a couple of minutes spare during a tea or lunch break so I have grabbed it off the docked PDA and blasted it up here. It is very rare for me to write new content from the office - the one the other day about the bloke nearly getting squished by a pallet truck was one such example, and it took me about two minutes to write. You can see that many of the longer pieces - Richmond, Cheltenham and others - are quite old, maybe a week or two or more out of date, and this is why. (And, sadly, that is as nothing compared to the backlog!)

Still for the record, I do actually work quite hard. I mean, yawn, yes we all do, I know ... modern life, an ting. The competitive market in which I operate. The thrill of a job well done. Yes indeedy.

Sorry to sound so defensive but I am quite sensitive about the question of my time at work: I am undoubtedly a rubbish employee in many ways but that's not one of them. I've always written a lot on the Tube and on the train home - accounts of holidays, stories, poems, other gibberish - and the only difference is that now some of it is reaching the web. No dig, by the way, is intended at the person who made the comment - on the contrary, she's performed a useful service by pointing out how it could look like that and making me think about it.

Vogel out.