Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear website,
Happy birthday to you!

This blog ‘went live’ one year ago today. To mark the occasion, what better than a photo of the cherry blossom which has just come out in the garden?

The first anniversary seems a good time to take stock.  If you read this blog regularly, do you like the frequency of new posts? I try to write something every couple of days. Do you find it too much, too little, or about right? Is the variety of subjects a good thing, or would you prefer it to be more solidly focused on music? 

Before I sail on into the second year, I’d be happy to hear your views. If you feel like giving me some feedback but don’t want your comment to be visible to everyone else, please send me a private e-mail by clicking the relevant link beside my little photo, top left of this page.

‘You’re looking at me with a wild surmise!’ said Bob as I came into the kitchen. I said I was trying to identify the unusual aroma coming from the oven. ‘It’s wild garlic’, he explained.

The clutch of pungent green leaves in this week’s organic veg box was a challenge to our usual cooking routines. After some thought, Bob devised a delicious soufflé flavoured with wild garlic and sorrel, served with purple sprouting broccoli.  It was a symphony in gold and green. Before we sat down to eat it, we agreed that the new dish should be christened Wild Surmise Soufflé. Served with a glass of Chablis, it was a luxurious supper on a spring evening.

We attended a funeral in a small church this week. As we sat waiting for the service to begin, an organist was stumbling through some well-known hymns, their outlines blurred by a haze of wrong notes. Though I tell myself to lighten up, I find I’m very impatient with this kind of stumbling. I can’t ignore it and tell myself that it is done with love, or at least goodwill and community spirit. Every time there was a wrong note or chord, I was distracted from my peaceful meditation on the life of the dear departed.

Why is it considered OK to be musically incompetent on a public occasion? Wrong notes or harmonies in well-known tunes are, for me, as bad as wrong words in a well-known text. Everyone would agree that it was unacceptable if, say, a vicar began the funeral service with the words, ‘We are tethered here today to calibrate the life of ….’. Yet musical errors are not considered equally startling.

Well, not ducklings, actually, but baby coots seen this afternoon. They were obviously extremely young, and it was difficult to photograph them because they kept zooming and darting about. Their parents kept diving down to look for food, and while they were underwater, the cootlings bowled merrily about the surface of the lake like dandelion clocks.

On Saturday we attended the last night of Mark Morris Dance Group performing ‘L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato’ at the Coliseum. Readers will remember that Mark Morris is a hero of mine.

Dance critics were in raptures about this show, but I still think that Mark Morris’s choreography is a special treat for musicians. It’s not just that his dance steps are wedded to the music – it’s more about his being unusually aware of the structure, emotion, texture and implications of the music, and unusually alive to the visual associations which can arise in a listener’s mind. It was Morris’s inspired take on the Schumann piano quintet which gave that rather hackneyed piece a whole new lease of life for me. Of course, choreography remains theoretical without dancers, and the present MMDG is absolutely superb. They make everything look natural and effortless, though it clearly can’t be. The live music was excellent too.

These days I seem to spend a lot of time getting worked up about people who are incompetent, poorly-trained, or don’t care about the outcome of their work. So it was not only a pleasure, but also a huge relief and a deep satisfaction to see something being done with such beauty and mastery.