Dog Star

Taking my dog on the train is like accompanying a celebrity guest. Milo just loves to draw attention to himself. He feels honour bound to introduce himself to all passengers within lead length. That is fine just so long as he does not encounter any dog haters. Usually it is ok. He just loves to nuzzle up to strangers. He makes it patently clear that he wishes to be petted and, when a passenger obliges, he nuzzles up all the more.

The dog is a great ice breaker. Normally I would not talk to my fellow passengers but with Milo I find myself in conversation with almost everyone. It is lovely to see sad faces break into smiles.

Today Milo excelled himself. A gentleman came to ask me if I would mind if he took a picture of my dog. "Not at all," I said. "I would feel flattered." Milo duly obliged by sitting obediently.

Butterfly

Learning a new piano piece is like opening a set of nesting boxes. You never quite know what is going to reveal itself. Now I've listened to Grieg's Butterfly before. It goes so fast that you can't quite catch the rhythm. It is a blur of semiquavers. The hands have to fly all over the keyboard from top to bottom. It is a showy piece. For that reason I wish to learn it. There is no point in studying chromatic scales and arpeggios if you don't make use of them and this piece makes ample use of that facility.

At first I thought this piece would be beyond me but having spent 45 minutes studying it it is not as forbidding as I thought. The notes fit under the right hand easily enough. There is a tricky chordal semiquaver passage ahead of me but I haven't come to that yet. The left hand part is harder than the right hand part as it includes broken chords which span more than an octave ie more than my hand can stretch. The only way to play them is to leg my hand roll and pivot. The movement has got to be supple because the note patterns keep changing and I have to move my hand around the keyboard. Right at the moment I am going painfully slow. If I can't get the notes right at snail's pace I certainly won't manage it at the correct tempo.

Music exams

Those of you who have never done music exams cannot know the angst that goes into preparation. One can practise scales and arpeggios methodically, one can prepare pieces but it is much harder to prepare for sight-reading tests and aural tests.

I am supposed to be able to spot modulations into the dominant, subdominant and relative minor or major. Changes of tonality i.e. flips from major to minor and vice versa, are straight forward but it is harder to listen out for the sharpened fourth or flattened seventh. That is tricky enough in a major key and even harder in a minor.

Cadence recognition is simply a matter of drilling but I am not going to get enough aural practice in my lessons. I can play cadences to myself but it is not the same as having a teacher play them to me so that I have to recognise them from the sound of the music - without the prompt of the score before me. Seeing as I don't have a teacher to supervise my daily practice I shall have to improvise. I have a book of carols. I could play them to myself and identify the cadences and modulations.

Sight reading is another matter. What is important in the exam is to keep a beat going and not to be thrown by wrong notes. That is as much a matter of nerve. You just have to keep going no matter what. My teacher Aubrey says that you can't really practise sight reading. Some people can do it. Others can't. Up to a point I agree with him but I still think some practice is a good idea.

French and Saunders

The best ever French and Saunders sketch ever was the one where they were dressed up as school girls engaged on a conversation about sex. The act took on surreal proportions as they described fishes gushing out of the male organ. That had me in stitches. Tonight's offering made me smile rather than laugh. I did like the Big Brother-style commentary from the psychologist. Reality tv is ripe for a send-up but I felt this was parody rather than pure comedy. No belly aches for me I'm afraid.

Earlier I did watch My Family and Other Animals. I loved the book as a kid. Afterwards I told my dog not to get any ideas from the action. I don't think Milo would mind at all if I lived in a menagerie of animals just so long as I did not include any cats.

I haven't been a complete couch potato today. I did manage to fit in an hour or so of piano practice. I'm trying to decide which piece to do for my grade 7. Do I play a syrupy piece which I dislike on the grounds that it is technically the easiest of the bunch or do I go for a more musically satisfying piece by Grieg? The Grieg piece is harder and longer but it repeats the same passages quite a lot. It sounds flash and fancy with flights of semiquaver passages. I've never played a piece like the Grieg piece before. I think I accept the challenge and go for the Norwegian.

Minority Report

I had to get up and leave the room at one point during this film. I was too squeamish to take the eye surgery so I bounded out to the kitchen to do some washing up. The dirty dishes were marginally less gory than the blood on the TV screen. Dick, the author of Minority Report,is an author who interests me. He made his name out of writing paranoid visions of the future. He experimented with drugs and suffered the consequences. The question is would he have been a better writer had he had better medical care and a healthier lifestyle?

Contemporary Opera

I've just watched a television opera by Judith Weir. It didn't have me gripped. My attention kept wandering. This was disappointing seeing as I had heard quite good things about Weir. I think she has done some work with COMA, an outfit which I used to be involved with. COMA stands for contemporary music for amateurs and it runs slightly mad music holidays for amateur musicians with an interest in contemporary music. I found the television pictures of this opera got in the way of my appreciation of Weir's music. The drama itself didn't engross me. It seemed a bit stiff and wooden. I think it was a mistake scheduling this contemporary opera just after the much more accessible Singing in the Rain. All in all nice try but shame about the end product.

Autistic children

Stegbeetle spoke of his autistic child. I spent a stint working as a dinner lady at a local school. My responsibility was to care for an autistic child. We played a lot of football. That was fine as long as we got a ball but balls were not always available and he would become upset. Lunches were difficult as he did not like eating. I remember once persuading him to take a bite of his peanut butter sandwich. Tears welled in his eyes. I felt awful. Eventually the child was sent to a special school. What really got me was the school. They did not tell me anything about autism and about how to cope with his behaviour. I moved to another school and there were a handful of children with serious medical conditions. We were not given any training on how to cope in an emergency. None of us were even trained to administer ordinary first aid. I'm not sure that parents would be very happy if they knew the extent of staff expertise in mainstream schools.

Smelly dog

I expect no sympathy from dog-haters. They'd say I only have myself to blame for keeping a dog in the first place but dog-keepers will understand the difficulty I faced today. While out on a walk I saw my dog rubbing his neck with glee on a patch of grass. The animal stank when I got him home. I left his coat to dry for a bit. Unbeknownst to me he retreated to have on a rest on my clean bed sheets. That was the last straw. I had to wash him. Now washing my dog is no simple operation. I had to shut the kitchen door to block his escape. Then I grabbed his collar with one hand and with a wet cloth in the other I lathered his neck. His dog shampoo is tea tree scented no less but that does not make him like being washed. He is water-phobic. Once I released him he rushed to the sitting room to rub his neck on the carpet to squeeze all that moisture out of his coat. He doesn't smell bad now.

Private versus state schools

Thanks for the commiserations over my stolen bicycle. It is annoying but there are worse fates.

Today I decided not to think about it. Instead I visited my friend Frances in Dersingham, a small village about ten miles away from King's Lynn. The bus journey takes you past some nice woodland. Frances, like me, comes from London and in talking we tend to mull over the pros and cons of living in the sticks. She likes the countryside but she is less enamoured by the quality of the local schools. Her eldest boy went to Wisbech Grammar where her younger son is currently a pupil. She said she would have much rather sent her sons to a local school but she felt they would have got a second rate education had they done so. Her oldest son has just started at Cambridge. In my family there never was a choice. Given my father was a Labour MP me and my sisters had to go to the local comprehensive. I can understand why Frances felt private education was better but I do not think I did so badly by sticking to state education.

Bike theft

When I lived in London I used to be burgled about once a year. I lived in ground floor flat in Brixton so I guess I was easy pickings. One time I was actually in the house. I was ill in bed with flu when a burglar forced his way through my sitting room window and made off with my television. Being a middle class liberal type I don't like to hark on about fear of crime but I did notice a huge sense of relief once I decided to move out of London. Since moving to King's Lynn I haven't had a house break-in at all. Indeed I have been struck by the honesty of the townsfolk here. Twice I have dropped my wallet and had it returned to me with the contents intact. But today my rosy view of the town's honesty has taken a tip. Somebody has pinched my mountain bike from my shed. It is ten years old and I had saved up enough money to replace it but that is not the point. That bike had sentimental value. I can get a new one but it won't be the same.

Addictive maths

Here in coldest Linton my mother's boiler has packed up so I am wearing two fleeces and there is a hot water bottle in my bed.

I'm still being conscientious about revising my maths. It's funny how admonishments from my teachers ring in my ears even though it is more than twenty years since I last sat in a classroom. I should complete the experience by marking my work with a red pen. My mother's dog decided at one point to explore the trigonometry functions on my calculator but fortunately I rescued it before he destroyed it.

My mother has taken to downloading sudoko puzzles from the internet. She's a serious addict. At least with my GCSE text book I get a variety of different types of puzzles. Mum is hooked on the one genre.