Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Not exactly a riposte - but an adequate response to Dick's provocation. I cut this out of the Guardian years ago and several of my mates had it on their notice boards for a while. Being an inheritor of this particular gene, or having acquired it through rigorous training, perhaps it's just as well I didn't pass it on.

Francois Vispre (b. circa 1730)
Portrait of a Man Reading
John Farr Reading Horace's Odes (Ashmolean)

I came home from the seaside this evening to find that some kind person had slipped this picture through my door in a plain envelope. Probably one of the playgroup mums sorting out photos; even at this remove, it's good to have a picture of my Easter bonnet.

We went up to Gorleston near Great Yarmouth to meet two new kittens and two friends (in that order). I am cat-deprived, so I had a wonderful time playing with a tabby and a tortoiseshell.

You will be sad to learn that while there I brushed the seat of my new white trousers against the stamens of a big bowl of lilies on a low table. I spent the day with a saffron coloured bum and tears in my eyes because the pants are probably ruined.

A few days ago I heard a little taster of a long-lost Mass of Alessandro STRIGGIO and my hair stood up on end for the music is very powerful indeed. It's an engaging story of the discovery of an important historical musical manuscript.

LATE NIGHT Promenade Concert Tuesday 17 July: BBC Singers/Tallis Scholars
Time: 10.15pm - c11.30pm Venue ROYAL ALBERT HALL

LISTEN HERE (Live on BBC Radio 3 for the following week. Available as audio on demand).

The first Late Night Prom of the season features a major rediscovery by harpsichordist and musicologist Davitt Moroney of the lavish multi-part Mass by Alessandro Striggio. The concert begins with The Tallis Scholars and the BBC Singers conducted by Peter Phillips in Striggio's celebrated 40-part motet Ecce beatam lucem, alongside Tallis's immortal Spem in alium, reputedly the result of a challenge by the fourth Duke of Norfolk, for Tallis to equal Striggio's 40-part triumph.

Striggio
Motet 'Ecce beatam lucem' (8 mins)
Lassus
Motet and Magnificat 'Aurora lucis rutilat' (11 mins)
Tallis
Spem in alium (9 mins)
Striggio
Mass 'Ecco si beato giorno' in 40 and 60 parts (first performance in modern times) (28 mins) *
Gary Cooper Organ (continuo); Timothy Roberts Harpsichord (continuo); BBC Singers; Tallis Scholars; His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts; Continuo Group; Peter Phillips conductor; Davitt Moroney conductor *

This little stinker is wreaking havoc on horse chestnut trees everywhere in the south and is moving north. The leaves of a wonderful tunnel of over 200 trees that line the road between here and Thetford are completely brown and about to fall. It happened last year too. So sad. We have been watching our big chestnut and, sure enough, it has gradually deteriorated and has begun to fall. According to Forestry Commission advice there's nothing to be done on large trees except to dispose of the fallen leaves by burning. It has spread throughout Europe. It doesn't kill the tree and didn't affect the conkers last year - so the kids are safe, but one will eventually face aesthetic choices for trees that become an eyesore, like ours, in mid-summer.

G Made me laugh as we sat down to dinner with the Times Saturday Jumbo crossword between us. "With your brains and my writing we'll have this done in no time." I usually try to snaffle it first, before he goes at it like a bull at a gate; I prefer him in the role of companion scribe.

I once worked for a Chief Librarian, J.T.G, a blunt, cropped-haired, fierce old gent from Hull; he had a house attached to the building & the library's Times was delivered there each morning at 8. Every day he would come through the back door at 8.45, shaved to a shine, and smack the paper down on the counter with the crossword done. I remember him well because I once summoned the courage to tell him he was rude after some show of sarcasm. He phoned for me to go to his office and when I arrived, trembling, he apologised. And, as is the way of these things, he was nice to me ever after.

At another small library we had a cleaner who used to pop back in her own time to cook us a hot lunch. It had to do with fancying the very handsome Librarian, but we all profited. Over our chops and veg', four of us would noisily and competitively polish off either the Guardian or Times crossword; I've always liked the fun of doing them in a group. I'm not much good at the really difficult cryptics now, they take me ages and get me in a rage, but occasionally I finish the one in The Times - in about 2 days! A poor do.

This week the actor Simon Russell Beale chose as his island luxury, the daily Araucaria crossword from the Guardian, to be flown in by pigeon. Googling Araucaria uncovered an amusing short article on John Graham the crossword genius behind the clever name.

'Quite a few people know that orchestra is an anagram of carthorse. Rather fewer have yet discovered that Manchester City is an anagram of synthetic cream. But it takes a crossword compiler of genius to discover that The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, yields the anagram: chaste Lord Archer vegetating.'

Apparently, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, prime minister from 1963-64, used to produce crosswords for the Times back in the 1930s. 'Once he was sitting next to someone on a train who was struggling with a crossword he had compiled. The man asked for help, and was deeply impressed when his companion got all the answers, apparently without a moment's thought.' How lovely, I have to struggle, but it is crack mental exercise; and I revel in the thrill of the phenomenon when, revisiting a puzzle left incomplete, one's brain suddenly, effortlessly discharges the answers.

- A lovely line-up of Vermeer's women.

- Swish as f--- (see comments) or not up your street?
My mate Sean regularly fills up a memory stick with music that he thinks I might like, folk, world, jazz, mainstream, easy, all sorts. Among the latest was a band he heard at Glastonbury Mr. Hudson and the Library. Their new album "A Tale of Two Cities" is pretty good - and I don't like hip-hop usually.

- While not mad for animated movies, I have no intention of missing Ratatouille - there's a 9 minute preview here, and if you aren't charmed by the brilliant animation in the sequence by the Seine I'll be most surprised.

- Andy Beck's fabulous series of photographs of London windows - and London at night make me nostalgic for my old city.