Blue too (ceonathus)

Pink

There's something, isn't there, about the pink chestnut blossoms? They have a sweet, satisfying ice-cream beauty on the tree, especially a really big tree (giant strawberry sundae?). But carpeting the ground, there's something raw, lightly bloody, in the colour and texture; in each tiny form, something creature-like.

more pink blossoms here

Can-can

Open space

This both gladdens and saddens my heart. Five minutes' walk from my house is a grassy, wooded hillside with dense, lush vegetation and long views towards the city - a precious open space that I DIDN'T KNOW WAS THERE! I suppose it's more than a decade since I walked that way...

Work

Well, I have started working - working, as they say, 'for myself'. There's one substantial editing job beginning to come in, with other, smaller things in the offing and lots of business and office set-up work still to do. Work that I needed and yet dreaded, still feeling pretty tired and crazy and floating now in this new, open, frightening context.

Work - great relief - feels good: a competent and reassuring rhythm regained. Familiar and yet unfamiliar too, since there's a whole new challenge to approach things differently, more carefully and spaciously, though not without a realistic sense of time and efficiency.

With country, continent and world in frightening chaos, perhaps the worst in my lifetime, attempting to control and improve the structure of an individual life feels foolish and presumptuous. But what else is there to do? Despair and apathy, for sure, can only contribute to the chaos, while individual hope and creativity might just, a million times multiplied, be a bit helpful.

One piece at a time, I guess, like piling fruit into a giant bowl.

Focal

More Bach, ouch

More lunchtime Bach. Solo violin. Oh dear, it was horrible. I wrote much more, but really you don't want to know.

Too wet to sit outside

We've just had two days with quite a lot of sunshine, which after so much rain felt magical and shone on endless, thickly painted shades of green (and on a lot of mud - oh, whoops, slide... not quite dried out just here!). I walked in the woods again and smelled clouds of hawthorn blossom that took me back to the village of Hartlebury, where I lived till I was six, heard songs and squeaks and rustlings all around, saw many birds I'd never seen before and foxes shimmying through the undergrowth. Used to think I didn't see much because of poor eyesight; seems it was more due to exhaustion and distraction. On Sunday, a retreat with Martine Batchelor: wise words that touched my heart and walking meditation in the sunshine. And now it's raining again and I have work to do. This feels too soon, but must be done and will be done. It's all good. Don't those birds I'd never seen before make it all worthwhile? I think they probably do.

Bach at lunchtime

Thursday lunchtime Bach, with an audience, mostly old, enjoying this less crowded and expensive pleasure at beautiful LSO St Luke's, where new leaves shimmer in the rain against the old stone. Here I am, intent on recovering motivation (no, I'm not sure this goes via intention). Bach Cello Suites come pretty high among motivations for staying alive. Will I ever hear a performance to match Casals' recordings made in the 1920s and 30s? I haven't found one yet. Not even Paolo Pandolfo's heavenly versions for viola da gamba. Raphael Wallfisch, one evening a few years ago in the new St Barnabas Church in Dulwich, was pretty great. For different reasons, so was this. And Pieter Wispelwey's Suite 3 and Suite 6? A lovely tone, but I kept finding his fast too fast and his slow too slow and he didn't seem to thread it all together. I see he has a broad repertoire - perhaps it takes a Bach obsessive...

The Bach concerts run through May, with the next programme (Schumann) scheduled for October - I wonder if I'll be attending then.

Shedding