So, she’s in the shop again for two days while they address the fact that she went from being very well behaved to sounding like an emphysema riddled old drunkard and blowing through 25 percent extra gas overnight. As always if it isn’t one thing it’s two things. Paul’s been at me for the valve noise for ages; she needs a new timing kit, and there’s other assorted shit in there.
To misquote the Catalonian Catalunyan poet, “I want no pity for this pain I would trade with no other man”.
Work itself is okay but there are circumstances at work that are very tiresome and disillusioning and when Jeff picked me up yesterday (thank you!) we had a lively discussion of management techniques on the way home in the car, and calmed ourselves down with some more Stargate SG1, which continues to be excellent although I imagine eventually the show will get tired. It just hasn’t happened yet.
And I hit – or will make an uncontrolled descent into – a milestone today. I’ve never ever ever been to a Beacon choir practice. I’m going to one tonight because I’ll be rehearsing drums for a single performance. When I get asked why I won’t join the choir – and I know I will be asked – when I have one of the better singing voices in the congregation – and that is merely a statement of fact, not me getting uppity – I am going to look at them all and say, “I don’t have to say why, and I’m not joining.” It’s the material. Dirges, with a few exceptions.
Resonances: “I was lining out the verse of the evening hymn.” (The Eddystone Light.) Has the dirgelike nature of so much church music something to do with its long history of illiterate singers?
Another resonance: sitting close to Jane Austen’s tablet in Winchester Cathedral listening to the choir practicing a Gregorian chant. THERE’S a dirge I can relate to – but maybe it was the place that made its power..
And another: It does not support continued sanity to examine closely the WORDS of most church music.