I woke up earlier than usual this morning and needed a shower. Clare was already up and listening to Classic FM. I immediately recognised the opening bars of a string quarter being played as a work by Haydn. It was a masterpiece I's been introduced to aged seventeen during a weekly 'Music Appreciation' class at Lewis Boys Grammar School, Pengam. Sixth form wannabe scientists like me had this plus a 'Use of English' session involving poetry and novels imposed on us, whether we'd passed English 'O' level or not, as I recall. We got acquainted with the work of William Golding and Dylan Thomas before they became mainstream on the curriculum.
Before multi-disciplinary studies were accepted as normal, this was an attempt to broaden our minds, to make us sound a bit more cultured than we really were if we went up for Oxbridge interviews. It was forty years before the internet was born, making culture browsing possible everyday for the curious of all ages remember! I was blessed to be brought up in a musical family. Many aspects of popular classical music I simply grew up with, played live at home, with a mother who was a piano teacher and a father who was a 'cellist, and two sisters who sang beautifully. Jazz and pop music weren't excluded either, as long as they weren't too discordant, but full of melody.
I couldn't recall the name of the work I was hearing, only that it was in D Major, so I googled 'Haydn string quartets', and came up with a Wikipedia site which listed them all, movement by movement, and gave access to sound recordings, to check for the one searched for. It was 'The Lark', I discovered. Then it came back to me, sitting in a temporary corrugated iron classroom, over-hot in summer term, cold in winter, where the school's second piano and instrument stock were kept, commonly known as 'The Music Shant', its resemblance to a third world shanty town dwelling having been noted by boys and staff alike.
It was a school with posh ambitions for not so posh boys. Great for turning working class lads into lawyers, doctors, educators, even politicians, and of course international capped rugby players. I endured rather than enjoyed my time there. There was a harshness, even a cruelty about the way we were treated. Bullying was not uncommon, but the school did the job of getting me to University where my liberal arts enculturation progressed and opened me to the world as I studied within the confines of un-applied science, as it was in those days.
Talk about having time on your hands! This morning I took each of my cameras, and reset them to GMT and corrected clock inaccuracies. This normally happens piecemeal and haphazardly when in use. Good for getting photos from different devices into an accurate display sequence. Strange to say it can make a difference when trying to recall a succession of events photographed.
I'm not sure how I succeeded in doing next what I didn't set out to do. I'm preparing six reflections for the daily Eucharist Gospel readings for the last week of the Christian year, a pretty glum lot altogether. I completed one four days ago, and started on the next. It came together easier than I thought, then another and another until I had completed and initially edited for length the five remaining drafts. About two and a half thousand words altogether. I don't know what came over me. No work done on the novel today, and that has come quite easily this past few days. My energy for writing seems to have returned, and I found time to walk over ten thousand paces indoors. I shall sleep well tonight hopefully.
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