Naughty Boy

I was struggling through Asda today trying to make sure that my own errant parent didn't visit any aisles where Kit Kats or full fat Walker's crisps were on display when I overheard a young mother in front of me berating the toddler that she was trying to keep under control. He was - it seems - a "very naughty boy". Actually he was the sort of very naughty boy that took absolutely no notice at all of such admonitions, that kind of low level sanction meant nothing to him at all, time to tip over another pile of cornflake boxes and grab a few more packets of Cadbury's from the 'seasonal display' section. Feeling a red mist descending I turned sharp right past the nuts and crisps, I'm a finely trained killer and I don't trust my instincts at all recently. It is no use crying over spilt milk after the event, better to back off before it comes to the 'draw' amigos.

It is a funny old word 'naughty' and I spent a happy ten minutes trying to guess what the etymology might be but my trusty 'Shorter Oxford' is melting down far away in the heat and humidity of a Japanese summer. Originally it was a synonym for 'bad' but then, like Morton's fork, the word lost all the 'middle ground' meaning of 'badness' and ended up with a double meaning of mischievous/disobedient and indecent/improper. Even this second definition is mutating as I sit here in the gloom typing away thanks to comedians like Frankie Howerd. Back in the sixteenth century it was fine to complain about the 'naughty weather'.

All the same I felt something very uncomfortable about all this talk of 'naughtiness'. Either you are an unrepentant materialist and operate in "do what thou wilt, this is the whole of the law" mode in which case you just don't know what 'naughty' means or you are a sensitive little violet like me who is mortified if you are ever called 'naughty'. Like the definition of the word itself there seems to be no neutral ground. I've realised over the last few years that it is important to be naughty sometimes and that I REALLY have to trust somebody completely before I can go there. It is maybe the greatest blessing in life that I now have someone at last that I can be 'naughty' with in any sense and it doesn't matter at all.

That kind of introduces something that has been in my mind recently about being 'good' but it will need to keep until another day.

We are away for a trip to Somerset later this week so 'Little House' may be a bit erratic for a few days.

Stripping paint

Deeply into paint stripping up at the railway today. We are repairing some timber work on a ninety year old North Eastern Railway guards van, and one of the corner upright posts needs replacing. This has given an opportunity to clean up and repaint a lot of the timber cladding, and I've been busily removing the old chocolate paint and treating the boards with wood preservative.

It is interesting to have to partly dismantle a vehicle like this - it gives you a chance to see how the Edwardian-era carpenters set about creating a strong structure with tenon joints and lots of iron braces and angles. And also how they chose wood for various jobs - the internal framing for example is mainly oak posts while the cladding is a well seasoned pine board, I would guess from the Baltic. Although by 1920 the production of parts at the Company's wagon plant at Faverdale was already employing modern manufacturing techniques and power tools you can see how the design has evolved from the days of building coaches to be pulled by horses and ultimately I suppose from the construction of sailing ship hulls, there is an approach to heavy carpentry work that runs through all these objects. And you can only really learn it by restoring the real thing, no book will give you the feel of what is 'right' design.

It is the same with 'stripping' too, especially when it comes to older paints and varnishes. You just have to learn to feel what works. Sometimes a blow torch will do it, but if there is any shellac around or some of the older lead based gloss layers you have to get down to it with either an orbital or a belt sander. You also have to get the rhythm of this kind of work, it will only go forward at its own pace.

And then at a quarter past six a steam excursion through town - an 8F on a southbound express working hard up the hill towards Aisgill. And the sun came out just in time. You can't have a better afternoon than that, don't you think?

Hole in the Ground

Really sunny here yesterday afternoon and so we headed up onto the fells to take a look at a spot that I haven't been to for about forty years. If you don't mind I'll keep the location to myself, this is one of those forgotten locations that seldom receives visitors and I'd like to keep it that way. In fact it didn't seem to have changed at all since I was last there, except that there are far fewer sheep around now in the area, grazing the higher moorland in summer seems to be becoming a thing of the past.

That meant that the grasses were longer and 'clumpier' and I struggled a bit to walk on ground that I used to skip across. Or is it just my calves and ankles getting weaker? Either way I made a mental note to buy myself one of those hill walking sticks, it isn't worth the risk of going over and damaging an ankle so far from the public road.

At this place a stream flowing off a bog encounters one of the Yoredale series limestone beds and over the last few millennia the water has etched out a sink hole and cave entrance. I explored the cave when I was at college, I wouldn't get far down it now. Actually there isn't so much to explore, it turns to the left just behind the entrance chamber and soon vanishes under a low sump, rather like a toilet 'U'-bend. The water must be pretty acid to cut a channel so quickly since the last glaciation here and also contains a lot of iron salts from a higher seam. This has left some interesting erosion patterns in the limestone.

Just above the cave entrance is a rowan tree (Sorbus aucuparia) which is only about three or four metres high and from a distance gives the impression of being a young plant but look closer and you realise that it is incredibly ancient, its roots lock into the solid rock to hold it secure against blizzards and gales at this limit of the tree line in the north Pennines.

So that is all there is to this place really. small stream runs off fell and vanishes into a cave under a rowan tree. But you could spend a lifetime exploring such a spot in detail, understanding it in all its moments and moods. A great place "To just sit" as we say.

Singing in the rain

Every holiday I ever took in the 'Lakes' over the years always involved at least one of these days and most likely several of them. The theory of it is that you go on cheerfully singing your Boy Scout songs as you tramp around on the fells doing what you would have done anyway, but in practice no matter how good your waterproofs and boots are it never seems to turn out that way.

On the choir trip we weren't planning on doing much tramping around but we did have one day in the Lakes when we went to Beatrix Potter's house at Sawrey and afterwards I'd planned a lunch and walk at Coniston but that would have been madness. Also one of the group was car sick in the rain with all that bouncing about on crazily narrow and windy roads in the hammering rain; the Lake District at its worst. So we just ended up in Windermere like everybody else. Or to be more exact Bo'ness. About a million damp campers headed for the shops and cafes but we got lucky and eventually found a parking space for £5 at the end of a muddy field and then even luckier and found a good pub restaurant with a table for nine free.

So here we all are on our way through the rain in Bo'ness with our umbrellas which look quite normal on the streets of Chiba or Tokyo but add a touch of colour and class to the dreary Cumbrian rain, don't you think so? Like us! Manet or Monet or even Van Gogh or any of the rest of that crowd could have made a good job of painting this scene but I got there first with my clicking finger. Eat your heart out Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds.

A very sad day

To be honest I feel so angry at the travesty of justice that took place in Britain today that I don't feel like blogging so much. Readers in other parts of the world must wonder what I'm referring to.

Last year in London during a demonstration an innocent passer-by called Ian Tomlinson was attacked from behind by a policeman on his way home from his work as a newspaper vendor. He was pushed violently to the ground for no reason and died as a consequence of the assault a few minutes later. The unprovoked attack - by a policeman who was trying to disguise his identity when carrying out the assault by covering his badges - was witnessed and also filmed by many people.

Today the English Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be prosecuting the policeman concerned because "the cause of death was not clear". By this they meant that there was a disagreement between police and independent coroners as to whether the specific cause of Ian Tomlinson's death was a hemorrhage or a heart attack.

That decision to not institute criminal proceedings is a complete disgrace and those responsible for it do not have neither the public interest nor the service of justice at heart. They have brought themselves and the British judicial system into utter disrepute.

Dressing up again.

One thing that we seem to have had a lot of fun with over the last few weeks is 'dressing up' in various guises. Oh Dear! First we came across a box of 'goodies' in the folk museum at Hawes that we all rifled through. And then somebody turned up the legionary outfit at the little museum up at Housesteads Roman Fort. You just couldn't hold us back.

Years ago I always wanted to get one of those 'period photographs' taken where you dress up in stovepipe hats and long dresses (but not at the same time eh?) and then the photographer takes your picture in sepia. I always thought that an Isambard Brunel look would suit me, maybe I wrote about THAT fantasy before. Then in an awesome fancy dress 'spectacular' at work one year during my alarmingly 'haggard period' which I must write about sometime I put on a 'Henry VIII' that would have left you breathless.


There must be a club for this sort of thing somewhere, a private place for consenting adults where for a small fee you can go along and browse through the garment rails and make your selection and change your personality completely for an hour or two, have the fun of being someone completely different from an alternative time and place. Queen Victoria, Nero, a Norwegian trawler skipper, Leonardo da Vinci. The sky is the limit, don't you think so? Fantasy takes over from 'reality' - whatever THAT was - and you plunge into a bizarre web of new sensations, images, relationships. How bizarre is 'bizarre'? Oh! Quite a lot, don't you think so? You can't play Tudor princes without wearing white tights and cod pieces I'm afraid. Nor Breughel without brandishing the odd paint brush.


So that's going to be my resolution for what is left of 2010 then - 'dress up' and dress up often and dress up and go on a hike too. More fun on a Saturday afternoon than watching the cricket. And all that stuff.

Another circular space

Having written about singing in one circular and sacred space yesterday let me tell you about another which seemed to fall into our lap out of nowhere during our visit to York last week.

I took the choir into the Minster on Friday morning - a place I almost never visit now since they started charging a fixed entrance fee. Whatever rational economic arguments might be concocted for installing turnstiles it feels to me that the place has been in a real sense deconsecrated and converted into a museum. Getting out my credit card to pay a fixed charge to enter a place intended intended by its creators to be experienced and understood as a metaphor for Heaven just feels completely wrong and always will do for as long as this sad practice persists. I don't doubt that reconciling the koan of offering contributions and depending on acts of charity to maintaining a large historic structure is a tough one but the answer isn't ever going to be selling tickets. It calls into question the whole purpose of the place, they might as well convert it tastefully for use as a very up-market Waitrose supermarket. I mean really.

Anyway that wasn't what I wanted to write about.

We split up once we were through the turnstiles but it turned out that in circulating around the building we all seemed to end up in the Chapter House at the same time. It is just to the north of the main cathedral structure and a completely circular large separate building, very beautiful Decorated Gothic style from the thirteenth century. And not only arrived there at the same time, but met in the middle of the space and somehow all realised that it had a quite astonishing acoustic.

Nobody put it into words but we started humming anyway. Very, very quietly, so quiet you could hardly pinpoint where the music came from and yet so perfect was that echo that we filled the whole room with the softest of sounds and people kind of looked around to see where the music might be coming from. And as we weren't even looking at each other it wasn't obvious either. Sweet sounds of Tallis and Byrd and Arcadelt drifting like the scent of wild flower blossoms. We just kind of started, did it and finished without explanations. There you go.

Know what you offer

Goodness! So many feelings about the last several days and so much I might write about. It will all take a lot of absorbing. This summer has been a time when so much in my life has 'come together' and a lot of the 'glue' has revolved around music. And now 'the ladies' - or 'the girls' as they seem to have become since they landed at Manchester, are somewhere over Siberia heading back to Narita and I won't see them again until early October. Sad.

I don't plan to use 'Little House' to document the details of our 'trip' - we will do that on our choir web site during the next few weeks and post a few recordings there too. But I think what I might remember here are a few moments that felt special to me. And here is one of them.



Last Monday we made a day trip over to Keswick and we stopped off at Castlerigg Stone Circle, a place that I really love and which has featured in 'Little House' before - I think twice. If you haven't been then go there, but if you can make it a special day with a buffeting north west wind and lots of low sunshine and cloudscape, something chosen from a Constable painting will do just fine You need to appreciate that full grand arena of hills that surround this ancient temple and circle of pure spirit.

We wanted to stand inside that holy space and sing but somehow we felt a bit shy. Not a lot of people around but we wanted to be on our own. So we headed a little further down the hill and worked through all the Byrd and Tallis and Palestina and Wilbye and Weelkes that we had in our heads and hearts. Of course the occasional hiker and dog did occasionally eavesdrop but no matter, our main audience was a large flock of Herdwick sheep that occasionally joined in with a chorus or two of their own. Oh! And of course Benzaiten, the Japanese goddess of music, wisdom and love. At least there were eight of us singing which would be one voice for each of her eight arms. 'Know what you offer' and who that offering is made for.

So here is one thing that we did and that is 'sing in open spaces' and why not, the Eternal rests in all things but not least in the wind and the sky and in such an aspect you can sing very happily under that and know that you are 'whole' and that there is nothing to be added or subtracted. Music is something more pure and perfect given form.

On the road again

A third of the way through this 'tour' with the choir and I am starting to feel now that I am 'on the road'. You can only learn this kind of stuff by actually doing it, and from that point of view the trip is a pretty comprehensive education, but so far it is fun. Two concerts completed at Garstang and Cartmel and our final public event looming at Kirkby Stephen on Tuesday evening after our first trip up to Hexham today. If you are in the area, join us.

I can't even begin to sit down and explore any of the many experiences objectively yet but I am very impressed at how well our singers 'communicate' here, and also how our music has sometimes 'taken off' - that extra difference between just presenting music and performing it. There really is something wonderful about singing in a choir.

Anyway - here we are this afternoon admiring the view from the bridge in Kirkby Stephen. Do you think we all look OK, a good group? Yes, I think so too!

Sixty three today

Sixty three today. Not sure how I feel about that. It doesn't feel like an anniversary that needs much celebration or even really to be noted much, by today's standards it isn't especially 'old' or especially anything. And I still feel, if not exactly 'fit', then at least pretty active both mentally and physically. I've been wondering over the last few days what, if I was writing a memo to myself, I would put in it in terms of good advice.

Certainly I feel that I ought to be budgeting my time more carefully, or at least in such a way that I don't just scatter gun the days with things that aren't what I really want to do. Some projects are probably not worth starting now. Am I ever going to learn Sanskrit? Yesterday I had more or less convinced myself that there were three or four areas that I should really focus on in life at the moment but I would blush to share them with you here.

And then that all seemed a bit formulaic too. You just don't know what it is good to spend time on in advance - things can just come at you out of left field and there you go, they are suddenly the important thing that is there before you that needs to be done, requires love and nurture. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have guidelines, have something that you get up for in the morning because it is important to do.

Anyway this next fortnight I won't need to worry about what life is for. The choir land at Manchester on Wednesday afternoon and the next two weeks is pretty well all spoken for, neatly marked up on a spreadsheet which I will print out tomorrow afternoon and which will serve as a life plan for a while with everything documented neatly. Let's hope it all goes OK.

So 'Little House' will be erratic for a while. I will be posting here, but only on days when I get a chance. If you are in northern England I hope we'll see you at one of our events. Wish us luck!

'The Duke' passes by

One advantage of living here is that it is but a short walk to the Settle to Carlisle tracks - not only Britain's most scenic railway but also a route that hosts many steam locomotive excursions throughout the year. Well, well, that never struck me before, but there you go. And not just steam locomotives but express steam locomotives running at express speeds too, no 'cissy stuff'. Something you would have to travel a long way to find anywhere else in the world.

We had such a 'visitor' this evening just before six - No. 71000 'Duke of Gloucester' on a railtour heading south. That is the best way to way to watch them go through here because it is a hard climb up Mallerstang to the summit at Aisgill and the engines are working hard and making a heck of a lot of smoke and noise as they thunder past at around 120 kilometres per hour. There was quite a crowd of 'locals' on the platform to see the 'Duke' come through.


An interesting locomotive. Built by British Railways in 1954 it was the last, and most technically sophisticated, express passenger locomotive to be built in Britain. It wouldn't have been built at all if the London Midland Region hadn't been short of a 'top link' engine after a disastrous train crash at Harrow, and it only had a working life of eight years before it was scrapped.

After that the locomotive diced with oblivion for another thirteen years. The cylinders were removed for a static display in the Science Museum in London and the remaining hulk rusted in a South Wales scrapyard until it was bought by enthusiasts in 1975. It then took a quarter of a century of loving labour to restore it to main line running standards.

But worth it, don't you think so?

Difference in style

Thursday evening we paid a visit to another choir our ladies are likely to make a visit to next week during their trip. It won't be a 'formal' session, more just a case of us joining them if we don't feel too jet-lagged on the second evening, but my guess is that most, if not all of 'our lot' will make it. The idea is that we join in on their rehearsal, or maybe even just listen a bit.

Both choirs we have visited so far here with this kind of learning session in mind have been really interesting, very different to each other and a million miles away from the kind of approach we take to rehearsing and performing. So we have a lot to learn from them. I've said it before, in Japan we rehearse endlessly, there is a complete focus on repetition. We live in a culture that pays attention to detail and planning and our motto could be "Practice makes Perfect". Hard to imagine performing anything that we have not rehearsed at least, let's say, two hundred times. And STILL we have our music glued to the end of our noses.

One of the choirs we've visited here doesn't use sheet music much at all, and the other seems to use it more as a starting point. People are taught largely 'by ear' - to listen and to imitate. Both Edera and I found ourselves struggling with this, we don't have the skill of listening and replicating to the same degree, we rely on our eyes rather than our ears to learn music.

And there is a big difference in style too. We worry a lot about dynamics, mark up our music closely for breathing and - being an ensemble - listen hard to understand the balance between parts. But English choirs are naturally more spontaneous, go for it; things aren't 'word perfect' but done with gusto.

So this is going to be an interesting trip I think - lots to learn! The ability of music to bring together people from completely different backgrounds and cultures is just amazing really.

ASDA trip

Took my mum out yesterday afternoon to do some shopping at ASDA. It is quite a long journey now from here down to the place that she lives - just over an hour - and then she takes some manhandling moving around with all the bits and pieces that she needs for mobility. So this kind of a trip is more than a bit of an expedition. But with Edera here and two of us to keep things flowing it makes it all a lot easier.

Yesterday didn't start auspiciously because we were late and then the wheelchair wouldn't fold down small enough to fit into the car and we had to abandon it hoping that the supermarket would have something that we could use. It turned out that they did - they had one of those electric powered 'buggies' with a basket on the front so that made the physical side of the trip much easier. I never saw that kind of thing provided in a Japanese supermarket, nor even a standard wheelchair come to think of it, but on the other hand people here are bigger, bulkier and I'm sure more liable to mobility problems later in life. Another topic worthy of research there. Are the Japanese elderly more flexible and fitter, or is it that more are more housebound and out of sight?

Certainly one problem with the freedom of choice that a 'buggy' offered was that I had to keep my wits about me when it came to which aisles our little group ventured down. Stationery, blouses and knickers were all on the agenda,chocolate biscuits and Walker's crisps were definitely 'not us'. I felt a complete hypocrite giving advice and strong guidance on this topic but after a recent trip to the hospital for a blood sugar count of 32 (yep! That is almost a syrup mix, sort of thing you could sweeten tea with!) I felt that somebody needed to exercise some restraint somewhere.

It wasn't entirely successful. On the way to the till down the 'seasonal goods' aisle we ran into multipack 'kit-kats' and she got two into her clutches which it was impossible to prise her fingers off, kind of shades of Father Jack Hackett there. But one of those 'got lost' in the busy process of unloading the car later while she went in for her tea. If she really is only going to eat one a day then she won't need the rest until next Wednesday eh? I'm shameless.

I sympathise though. having given up both fags and booze in my long life I know that food in the form of sugar and fat is the real 'biggie'.