SOME DAYS (AND NIGHTS) IN BITS

FRIDAY. Awake at 03.35. Smoky dark. Test my dodgy left eye: still these strange white flashes as I move my head from side to side. With my hair-trigger response to anything that tests my sense of vulnerability, a few moments of paranoia follow. Imminent blindness? I get up and creep downstairs. Wind buffets the house; rain pebbles the windowpanes. I fire up the computer and blue light illuminates the desk. Two-and-a-half hours later Reuben comes barreling down and the day begins to the sound of Manchester United winning 8 – 0 in the wonderful world of Wii.

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SATURDAY. Listened to Tamsin Little playing The Lark Ascending and then heard her interviewed on Woman’s Hour. She was asked whether she was as moved in the playing as the audience was in the listening. She said how difficult she finds it during the last spiraling passage, which covers the harmonic spectrum of the instrument; how technically demanding is the control of volume and pitch against the emotional impetus of the whole piece. Fascinating, that balance between technical engagement and impassioned involvement. In acting and dance the performer is locked into the assumed role and emotional discharge must wait until after the event.  In music the greater likelihood must be that the performer is at least in part ‘present’ during the act. The greater the need, therefore, for some imposed discipline of detachment.

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SUNDAY. A thick white rime across the fields all day. A methane blue sky, melding into that unlikely compound of copper and pearl at dusk. Two red kites swinging low over the garden and then loping off across those crystalline fields.

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MONDAY. Awake at 01.20 with agonisingly sharp arthritis in my right big toe. It returns every few months with (thus far) periods of complete remission in between. I’m not bad with pain usually, but this is something else. I swallow a dicloflex and get up, hoping for some relief within an hour or two. 03.18 and I’m still at the keyboard. Tired and fed up, but philosophical. I must go with Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

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And so, at 03.30, to bed.