Oh Well

The dog ate it. I was ill. The wi-fi was down.

None of those are true. I must admit I thought it had been two weeks since I wrote a blog. It's been four. That is really slack. And I don't have a great excuse, I just haven't got around to it. Sorry!

What have I missed? Well, some of you may have missed my Voxcetera concert which played to a packed St Sepulchre in London last week. It was fabulous to do, and I think those attending enjoyed it too. For the first time we really took ownership of some tricky Britten and, having now heard a recording, made it sound really good. Plus of course there are those spine-tingling moments - like the way the D minor fortissimo chord towards the end of the Esenvalds piece just hung in the air and never seemed to die away.

Back to earth with a bump, I watched "Mr Toad and the Sell-Out" on BBC last night (aka the Lib Dem and UKIP debate). Clegg is Mister Political Expediency - and has been so often that he's probably retained the trophy by now. But Farage - dear God help us. In the same way as creationism got clever by evolving (maybe a bad choice of word there) into intelligent design, UKIP is just a more respectable "we hate Jonny-foreigner" party isn't it.

Watching the debate over a grotty internet link and Twitter makes one smugly complacent that no-one's falling for that old shit again. But I fear that's not the case. UKIP is generally picking up support across the spectrum, from those who are disenchanted with the political class and with, generally "Them". It's Farage's affable pub-bore facade that makes him so credible with so many. They are going to do well in the Euro elections - it's not a question of whether they beat the Lib Dems for 3rd place. I'm afraid they will do a lot better than that. That is just so embarrassing. Farage is a French M. Le Ros-bif  caricature. And Stew Lee's brilliant dissection of UKIP a couple of weeks ago doesn't counter it - UKIP voter's aren't watching stuff like that.

In case you hadn't noticed, alongside getting fit, my 'don't get political' and 'don't get sweary' New Year's resolutions have gone by the board. If you keep coming back to the blog for its gentle humour and flights of fancy, you may be disappointed (though I've not written for four weeks, so on reflection probably no more than you have been already).

Anyway, back to work... more soon

Crying

No post yesterday - I was having too much fun on my vocal weekend away with Voxcetera, up near Milton Keynes. When we took a break from socialising at about midnight and went out for a walk, it was a change to be able to see the stars - it's easy to forget how much light pollution there is in London.

But I'm sort of back in the real word now - home to do ironing, accounts etc, before being back to work tomorrow. Oh well.

I have always found music a very strong emotional trigger. There are still tracks or albums that I associate with a specific period of my life, and I can't listen to that music without bring back all those feelings, good or bad. Picking one at random - I listened to the album "April Moon " by Sam Brown (now singer with Jool's Holland's big band) a lot while revising for my finals - and if I put it on now I know I would be back in  that room.

And creating music is even more emotional. So having spent time over three days with some beautiful music (Esenvalds' "Long Road" here being an example - this version is a little recorder-heavy for my taste but the piece still stands listening), I've certainly been emotionally fragile today. How do I know? Because I started crying whilst doing the ironing. I was listening to something slightly soppy (not saying specifically - a bit too Country to own up to)  and out came the tears.

Is this a normal thing? I've always done it - when I've been emotional or tired so I see it as perfectly ordinary. But you know how blokes are - we don't really discuss emotions. So do others of you do this? Or are you all now whistling and edging slowly away from me?

I'm not getting into the clichéd "men should be more in touch with their feelings rubbish". Most men I know would get emotional about the big things in life - births deaths and marriages etc. (And look how emotional some blokes at a London football match got last week when a player chose to remind them of the score.) I'm specifically talking about irrelevant stuff. When was the last time a film, or a picture, or a sunset, moved any of you to tears?

The Christmas cake is no more

Not sure if doing something twice, other than perhaps crystal meth, could be deemed a habit, but two lunchtimes back at work and two blogs written. Although Blogger does have an IPad App, I’m not confident in getting everything right with it, so I type the text into email, mail it to myself and then correct /format, tag and post on the desktop machine. At the weekend I shall be away from a computer for 48 hours so will be forced into posting direct – let’s see how it goes.

Yesterday I was both quasi-jet lagged (going from getting up about 9am and going to bed past midnight to having to be up at 6:30) and on day one of my 5:2 eating plan (not using the ‘D’ word). Result was that by about 7:30 I was really lacking in energy. This may need a rethink – how am I going to manage the gym and not eating? Obvious answer is to shift the two days to non-gym, so likely Tuesday and Thursday. But that feels unbalanced. My immediate concern with the 5:2 would be that I'd just go crazy on the next day and eat twice as much. It's early, but at the moment the desire to get a benefit in return for yesterday's hunger is holding sway.

Still, hot bath, in bed by 10, asleep not to long after, and a good night’s rest, followed by the last (small) piece of Christmas cake for breakfast, and I feel much brighter today. And that’s just as well, because I have my first Voxcetera rehearsal of the year tonight. We are starting to work for our March concert – the Mozart Requiem, Britten’s AMDG, Purcell and Essenvalds (no – I haven’t either). Can’t wait.