You know what they say - don't shoot the pianist he's only doing his best. Mind you I don't know who 'they' are in this case. Anyone know from where the saying comes? Or so I have just enquired of the Purple Coo website - of which I am a longstanding member. The site has just been rebuilt and in another place causing much ruffling of feathers in the dovecote. I guess we’re getting old and change is too difficult. My own life I keep feeling is in a rut. There’s this horrid feeling that comes sweeping over me and tells me that there is an inescapable sameness about day to day events and that I ought to sell up and head off into the setting sun on a camel - or take the Queen’s shilling, or become a foreign correspondent or whatever the modern day equivalent is for someone of my advanced age. Maybe it is to join MSF as a volunteer, or some other benevolent organisation, and be shot at for your pains.
I did try to join VSO once - when I had fallen on hard times and I thought they might welcome a pair of hands while I gathered my wits about me, but they didn’t and wouldn’t let me. Bah! Ah well, it was before the Big Society.
Still running off to sea or whatever would I tell myself be grossly irresponsible seeing as one has responsibilities in the here and now, friends, and particularly relations, who would be not one wit pleased by some poetic abandonment. Besides, I have to say I would miss them dearly as I am fortunate to enjoy tolerably good relations with my relations, if you see what I mean and I would be bereft were I not to see my little grandson who is coming to lunch tomorrow with his parents in tow. Which means I shall have to scrub the kitchen floor ready for him to deposit and smear a new quantity of comestibles over both it and the kitchen furniture.
Babies and toddlers should really be fed on dried food until the age of ten.
Well, where were we? I am afraid this may turn out to be a somewhat meandering post. So let us return to the pianist issue with which I began this ramble. Last evening I put on the radio and heard, quite by chance Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. On Classic FM. I love that piece and can recommend a listen to anyone fancying a quiet fifty minutes, curled up on the sofa with some light and not too distracting reading matter. It was the first piano concerto (and maybe even the last) to open with the piano itself. A soft chord. Beethoven played it first time round, apparently.
I think it is safe to say that he didn’t play it on a Yamaha either, which has always made me wonder why you don't you ever see a Bosendorfer motorcycle? Or a Norton organ, I suppose? I mean it is hard to think of two machines with such different purposes as a piano (or an organ) and a motorcycle with a particularly plangent and revolting whine. You don’t think they make them in the same place, do you? I suppose both machines have to be tuned. But not, I guess by the same people.
I'm going to a film preview tonight. A French film. The story of (I've forgotten - it's about some woman writer who lived 100 years ago). All top hats and petticoats. But somehow Egypt comes into it too for the blurb describes it as Indiana Jones meets Amélie. The fearless writer doing the equivalent of volunteering for MSF in 1911. A year incidentally when very little happened. Or so says James Cameron - the famous foreign correspondent responsible for preaching the then heretical doctrine that the people who lived in Vietnam at the time it was being bombed to pieces were actually human beings and cared just as deeply about their nearest and dearest as the rest of us. James Cameron was born in 1911, or so he tells us in his autobiography, and grew up in France.
One day he had rather a shock when his school teacher in a fit of heightened emotion removed his own arm and waved it above his head. It was a false arm, of course; the previous one having had an argument with an explosive projectile around 1916, but the young James Cameron hadn’t realised this. It rather put him off wars and fighting for life.
Anyway, his biography, which came out around 1967, is a very good read. It is called Point of Departure and was once available in Penguin. Not one letter of this beautifully crafted book is out of date though for all I know they all may be out of print. He was a pianist and most definitely not one to be shot at. Though of course he was. Literally and metaphorically, too.
The picture shows a most respectable looking James Cameron in India and comes via the BBC and the Guardian, whose assistance is acknowledged with thanks.
