Night at the Opera

We had a night out on Friday – the students put on Eugene Onegin. As with last year’s Magic Flute, you had to admire their enterprise. Our student productions really are student productions, with no bought in stars, and the number of good voices and competent musicians we can field in a given year is astonishing. It was not without is problems – there were as many musicians as could physically fit into the Cowdray Hall’s little orchestra pit, which translated into only one or two violins per part, and the typical Tchaikovsky massed strings came out a little vinegary as a result. The most serious problem was Onegin: he had a perfectly reasonable voice, but the plot only works if Onegin is a fatally attractive rake. The lad in question was more of a serviceable watering can, really – he sounded all right, but unless Lensky can reasonably believe that merely dancing with this fellow is sufficient to cause a woman to fall under his spell, then you can’t explain why he gets so cross. Tatyana’s inexplicable devotion is less of a problem since she’s supposed to be a fantasist anyway. Another thought which was prompted by the unfolding narrative (and thinking of other operas)  is that aristocratic life would be a damn sight easier if doting old duennas were routinely exiled to Novosibirsk, or painlessly destroyed. Apart from that, Tchaikovsky’s tendency to recycle his effects meant that there were odd moments when one expected a fleet of swans to cross the stage in profile or the guests to assemble for Aurora’s wedding. Which prompted reflections on what would have happened if they had.

Fifty shades of grey

We have finished redecorating the back spare room.  Barmy but slightly wonderful is the general consensus. The furniture, including the bed, has been painted a very light stone-colour with the exception of the mule chest which it would have been a shame to repaint since it has very spirited 19^th century faux graining. The walls have acquired a dado rail, beneath which is a medium grey with a much lighter, luminous grey above. Woodwork is white. The carpet remains pale grey, and the charcoal grey Lesbian toile-de-jouy curtains have been re-hung. The bed is surmounted with a gilded corona  faintly reminiscent of a wreath of oakleaves, hung with pale grey muslin; there are gilded brass tie-backs to either side of the headboard. We had to go into work, but Godmama spent the whole day sewing, since the muslin needed about ten metres of seaming. The bed itself is adorned with a nineteenth-century quilt made of blue and grey striped ticking. Even as I write, a committee of taste is deliberating over hanging the pictures, which are also grey, with gilt or silver frames, and there is a ghostly mirror with very foxed antique glass, which I also gilded. Most of the decorative items have been removed, but there was a good agonize over the spongebowl on the mule chest: blue transfer-ware with a spirited representation of Bacchus and his pards, plus Greek temple and palm trees, or grey Grecian spongeware? (Grey Grecian). Girandoles were tried, and taken away again. The effect is on the whole Swedish, and extremely elegant. Also, comfortable, and surprisingly jolly, and thanks to almost everything being pale grey, the corona etcetera is very much less reminiscent of Disney princesses than one might have feared.

Then ten years passed like a flash ...

I have been running this blog for a decade. Our first post, April 1 2003, was the following:

Reasons for Invading Switzerland

1. We don’t like them
2. Nobody at all nice likes them
3. Their neighbours can’t stand them
4. They are in fact the Axis of the Not at All Nice
5. The Pofessor has a personal interest in the overthrow of the current régime and therefore we ought to do it
6. The Food and Drug Authority considers chocolate a dangerous substance which needs to be kept in safe hands
7. We are convinced on evidence we consider adequate that they have stockpiled weapons of mass destruction at Lindt-Sprüngli Gbmh
8. Nobody needs to tell Tony until we’ve started shooting

We will assemble on the borders with placards in small neurotic letters

“nobody likes you, yah, yah, yah”
“call that a national literature?”
“put that in your fondue and smoke it”
“Jung was a loony”
“four hundred years of democracy and all you produce is the cuckoo clock”
“Müsli’s no Üsli”
“Calvinism is the Root of all Evil”

If there is NO FIRM COMMITMENT TO SURRENDER BY THE FORCES OF EVIL within 24 hours then we will invade with maximum prejudice.

After that, we settled after that to chronicles of small beer, but at the time I think we were fairly cross about contemporary politics, not without reason. Fast forwarding by a decade, Godmama is achieving wonders: I’ve gilded the corona for the bed, which looks terrific, albeit as camp as all get out, we have several shades of grey on, or about to go on, the walls, Tony has put up  a dado rail, which has been undercoated. I will have to wash the muslin for the bed curtain, which has become mysteriously grubby, but that is probably to the good since it seems to be a bit more starched than we actually want.  We are within sight of the room's being sorted out, and very fabulous it will be. Also fast forwarding by a decade,the Professor was talking to a friend of ours who is both richer and more techno, who was mentioning that his fridge talked back. What it says, I gather, is 'I need to be defrosted' or some such, but the field is open for more elaborate commentary. 'Isn't that your third gin? 'Put that chocolate bar down, and step away'; or a more general, 'think what you're doing to yourself'. The latter might be the most likely since it would require less effort from the manufacturers and, given natural wastage as people opened their fridges and went berserk upon being corrected, increase the number of fridges bought. However, the events of the last decade seem to have brought us significantly nearer to redefining Lindt as an Axis of Evil.

Onward and upward

Spring has finally sprung. The daffodils are coming out, and so are the scillas. We have the odd really nice day, though the weather is still very up and down, and we had a lovely bout of hail this afternoon by way of variety. The ex-tropical godparents turned up on Friday, which has been a great addition to general gaiety. Teh four of us went out for a little excursion yesterday, which was sunny with a refreshing but not downright cold breeze, and ended up treating ourselves to an ice cream from the shop in Portsoy that makes their own, out of cheerfulness and by way of acknowledging that it was the first day of the year on which ice cream was possible, let alone appealing. Meanwhile, on the work front, for the last few weeks the Professor and I have been entangled with trying to sort out the early modern library of a noble family in Fife (hence pursuing astronomy and alchemy in Edinburgh last week) I’ve now more or less got it sorted out (the conclusion, by the way, boils down to saying that they did nothing in particular but did it very well, which should come as no very great suprise). Anway, with that now out of the way I can start setting about various other concerns which have been more or less on hold. The beautifying of the back spare bedroom is under way: the horrid moulded paper has finally been stripped off the window wall, revealing perfectly respectable plaster (we had feared that putting on that kind of paper was by way of concealing some ghoulish mess underneath), and we are seeing what can be done with the various shades of grey currently to be had, for reasons of economy. Having spent the entire day (the entire week, really) on the misadventures of lowland lairds, I finally have time to join the party, and will set about  doing some gilding tomorrow, and quite possibly, wielding a paintbrush.

Spring and Alstroemerias

The long delayed, long promised spring, has sort of appeared: it’s been windy which takes a bit off the general balminess but the wind is south-westerly and has lost its cruel edge. The daffodils have come out at last. I have various things to plant and can now think of planting them – we have been very taken with alstroemeria as just-about deathless cutting flowers, and I have bought some nice red ones from an alstroemeria grower. There are also lilies. We are going to put the cutting dahlias in the greenhouse. Last year they flowered for about three weeks before the frost got them, so if they’re in the greenhouse, they should start earlier and go on longer. Doubtless there is something wrong with this brainy plan but we’ll find out as it goes along. I was in Edinburgh in the middle of this week, which made a change. My academic occasions took me to the Royal Observatory, somewhat out of my usual path. The actual observatorial bit is a fine Victorian structure, a cylinder with anthemions round the top painted bright blue, the whole thing reminiscent of a Brobdignagian biscuit barrel. It was all a bit surreal; they don’t seem to have a reading room as such so I was perched in the corner of a office, with Radio 2 wurbling on, trying to make sense of fifteenth and sixteenth-century books about astronomy, of surreal monetary value. On the home front, the Professor has learned how to make Aberffraw Cakes. These are a rather beguiling version of shortbread, moulded on a scallop shell and cooked rather faster than the Scots version, so they are very pretty and the variation of thickness gives them a variation of texture. He was attracted to the name because of, some time ago, coming across the name of the Prince of Aberffraw, one of these titles which pop up in various corners of the archipelago and have somehow survived the tidy instincts of the Normans.  Another, slightly more suprising recreation was upping and buying the new Bond film, which we watched last night. The only Bond film either of us ever recollects seeing is Casino Royale (1967), so it came as a bit of a shock. We rather enjoyed it. The Professor enjoyed the moments of London architecture, and I particularly liked the moment where the ‘orrible villain, having been imprisoned in a glass cube which we were doubtless intended to assume was defended by death rays and so forth, spiritedly demonstrated the falseness of his teeth by taking them out and having a good gnash (my grandma used to do this to entertain/horrify the small), after which he took up a yoga position -  camera then cut to something else and returned to find the cubicle empty. I have to say that a director who, about 100 years after the term was coined, actually implements ‘with one bound, he was free’, has my sincere admiration.

Emblem of Fidelity

Someone is a dear little Emblem of Fidelity in these parts, and I rather think it’s the Professor. Despite the fact that it is 1) the end of the first week in April and 2) snowing, he has taken Miss Dog for a walk. It was rather less disgusting earlier on, so we went off for a jolly – we have a young friend in hospital whom the Professor is keeping supplied with knitting wool, so we were due a visit to the wool shop, but there was, beyond that, a sense that between mountains of work and the weather, we had simply got into the habit of sitting in front of our respective computers from morning to night. We were reminded of the unwisdom of this by the extremely sad and sobering spectacle of one of the Professor’s quondam graduate students who has recently had a stroke, having barely taken a day off or had a full night’s sleep for about ten years. Out of general rottenness and lack of consideration for others (I quote) we decided not to take Miss Dog. She loves riding in the car, but after really not very long at all, you start getting whine, whine, are we there yet, and it’s very distracting, especially if the journey is conceptualised as a lengthy one not involving going for walks in the forest. Having attained our first objective, acquired some eau de nil silk and had a bite of lunch, we set off over the Cabrach, which is one way of telling oneself it’s spring, since it’s a mountain pass, of the sort that’s pretty much impassable in winter. It was a fine, if bleak, spectacle, with ramparts of snow on either side of the road, dark purplish-black heather moorland, mottled with snow, and high silver hills rising beyond. Not a sign of new growth on the heather, or anything. Then we dropped down from the high moors into  Dufftown to visit our antiquarian friend, where, alas, we were inclined to be negative about various items he wasn’t sure about – he said he was quite pleased to have an opinion, but I do rather wish that one of his geese had turned out to be swans. What I think made it all a bit better waa that he hadn’t actually bought the objects in question, but was thinking about them. When we were making our way home, it came on to rain, then sleet, then snow. I keep thinking that if there’s one day of sunshine our daffodils will start coming out, but they haven’t.

More Light

We have had our own private festival of light. I have been more or less cooking in the dark for a couple of weeks, because of the worrying behaviour of the ceiling lights. The cheerful and competent electrician Fraser eventually put in an appearance yesterday, and proceeded to have a frustrating time. It wasn’t the lights, it seemed. He started chasing the fault back and back, while it all got more and more mysterious, and eventually it became necessary to take up the carpet and the floorboards in the small back bedroom, and then, when that didn’t help, the landing. Eventually a fairly major cable was disinterred, which had been gnawed by meeces to the point where two bare wires were touching, producing the infuriating on-and-offishness of the fault. Fraser was very pleased: a rational man, he dislikes mysteries. We were also very pleased, since the wire in question was something no rational householder would want lurking under the floorboards, so then it was simply a matter of reinstating the back half of the house. Easier said than done, but with Tony’s help, we are more or less organised, and as of today, I have new ceiling lights, which makes domestic life a good deal easier. Outside, the weather continues quite shockingly dreary. It’s certainly above freezing, but there’s so much moisture in the air and the ground that it feels as insidiously cold as if it wasn’t. We have lost a lot of auriculas to the extreme dampness of everything, and I suspect there will be other casualties, but all the same, the odd thing is breaking surface at last. My crown imperials have put their noses up, the tips of the monkshoods have appeared like little constellations of lime-green stars, and the peonies are sending shoots like little red fists rising from the ground. I found my garden book, and everything’s about a month late, but if we get some sun maybe it will start to catch up with itself.