Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

In the same way that the camera surrendered itself entirely to Marilyn Monroe, so is the violin the willing creature of Nigel Kennedy. He has musical genius without doubt and something more, that even some of the greats did not have in such measure, the ability to call out the soul of the instrument. He is a one-off, eccentric, scruffy, annoying, endearing, populist, self-promoting, but always deeply in love with the music. On Saturday's prom he gave the Elgar Violin Concerto after an unheard of nine hours of rehearsal with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; playing in complete emotional unison they produced a performance of perfect balance and beauty. The concert is available for seven days on the Proms web page**. If you don't want to listen to the whole thing please just select the section from 29:50 to the end of the movement, nine minutes, and see what I mean about soul. And a Guarneri has a lot of that.
**No longer available at the BBC website, but now up at You Tube.

(The wee Prodigy)

Artist Marja-Leena Rathje has been writing about her 3-D scanning techniques. It fired up some of her correspondents, including me, to have a go. I scanned five of my favourite stones/fossils (lid open, covered up with a black cloth) with my cheap old Tevion scanner from Aldi. The wonderful cat stone found at Brancaster beach gave me the idea of lifting a pattern from each stone with Photoshop and pasting them to connect and decorate the group. I put a grain filter on it to get a bit more presence. It's a bit crude and rough-edged but I rather like it.

I only recently noticed Michael Gambon's extremely beautiful hands while watching an old Maigret episode. Long fingers, expressive gesture, shapely nails are features I might have observed. Always in work, he went big with an extraordinary performance in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective; I have followed him with pleasure through the Poliakoffs, Layer Cake, myriad TV and film parts to Harry Potter and Cranford. I knew nothing of his life until I Googled him just now. Quite colourful it seems. He can be very funny too.

I had a tooth out today, nasty it was, destroyed by an abscess under a crown. As a metal crowbar and giant pincers began excavations, or so it seemed, I decided to take my mind elsewhere. I toured my grandmother's house, trying to remember the colours of curtains, patterns of brass bed knobs, numbers of stairs and pictures on the wall. I had just got to the Boyhood of Raleigh hanging in the spare bedroom when I heard my dentist say "All done, no need to drill the roots, they came out OK". I discovered tears at the corners of my eyes and a handful of the nurse's overall in my fist, but to all intents and purposes I had been absent. I must try the technique again, it has many potential uses.

How's this for an invention - a pan designed for the ergonomic frying/grilling of sausages? Using a conventional one it's an absolute bore to try to make 10 greasy cylinders evenly brown as they slip and re-expose their burnt side while you adjust their neighbours. Neat rows of divided non-stick valleys would allow perfect management of each banger. Patent is not applied for, so you may filch the idea and go into production with my blessing.

On the principle of the condemned man, I was given a large pre-extraction breakfast in bed this morning (with burnt banger). G had been for a paper and brought it folded to show an ad' for £1 Ryanair flights to Dublin in September and October. Well, of course they weren't a pound - but with taxes exempted and just a baggage charge thay came out at £24 return per ticket. Sounded like a good deal, so without delay I rang two friends who love Ireland, then booked us all in, Sept 1st till the 8th. As well as enjoying Dublin craic, I should be able to pop down to Roscrea to see my relatives for a couple of days. Bit worried about my carbon footprint, though.

That reminds me, I heard a 'Two Ronnies' joke this morning - about the Irish indoor athletics meeting that had to be cancelled because the weather turned out fine. As an ex-Molloy, I'm allowed to tell stories like that.

I'm held by this picture by Matt O'Sullivan, it offers almost a surfeit of beautiful things. If I could achieve even a fraction of the superb content of his photography I would be overjoyed. Among many others, I treasure his Easter Parade group.


The music of Lata Mangeshkar, known as India's nightingale and the queen of Hindi film music, is widely accessible on the net; I have been wallowing in some of it this evening, this one is a favourite. Bollywood music is addictive I find, even if its vehicles are somewhat over florid. The business of the playback singer is particularly intriguing, where motherly, mature ladies sing on behalf of glamorous young stars in voices that have, still, the fresh timbre of youth.

A pretty gesture. Detail from Rembrandt's Danae.

I drove a lady yesterday who used to be well-known locally for taking in injured birds. She had to give it up as she got older but has just one left - a tame raven that stayed with her for over twenty years. A few weeks ago it flew off and hadn't returned after several days; she put notices in the village shops but there was no sign of him until the phone rang one afternoon. Her raven had turned up; it was suggested that she should come urgently to the Post Office as it was sitting on a girl's head in the grocery department. She grabbed a box and in no time had retrieved the bird unscathed. The teenager had been extremely brave - the shock of a large black bird suddenly landing on the bonce would faze most people, but she braced herself and allowed it to settle while she waited. Apparently the bird is known as Never because the owner's son always said "Never have a raven..." Nice little story.


We have baby wagtails for the very first time here. This is a poor shot of one of them - I couldn't get close as I haven't much zoom. It's lovely to watch them being fed on the ground - there is so much tail activity with three of them together, they look like those wooden birds on a spring that we used to clip on our pencils. The parents go into a feeding frenzy when we cut grass - there must be particularly tasty insects or seeds available. I'm really pleased to see them.

I have lately become particularly interested in hands - a pair like these tell the story of a life of work, I find them as beautiful and certainly more interesting than a smooth set. They are extreme but a little like my 'Aunt' Lizzie's, roughened and twisted by a life of cleaning and washing that continued into her nineties. She had been a housekeeper and actually liked doing housework. She lived to be 104 and, when she could work no more, I used to take enormous pleasure in seeing that her hands became soft and well manicured. She used to flash her diamond ring and say that, at last, it looked the part.