Ramblings

The journey came and went, and I took some photos along the way to show you my route. It was wintry , wet and a little chilly, but that pleases me much more than a hot sticky journey !



A Stop at the Real Food Company, Tyndrum, and a fab log stove !



Mid Glasgow Bypass !



City Lights and 40 miles to go !

I listened most of the day to the triumph of the miners in Chile being brought back to the surface and how they are coping with life after being underground for what must have seemed like a lifetime. The media were already talking about a 'book', film rights, and how much each man could expect to be paid for his 'story'. What will be the outcome, each man's take on it will substantially different from his work mates, and the younger men will feel quite differently from the older, more experienced chaps....what a dilemma for them. They are generally poor working people whose life could be changed in a moment if they sell their story. I hope it does not cause long term pain and antagonism if stories are told, and we hear about heroes, cowards and the like ?

Today my friend and I picked up the piano tuner who will tune the hall instrument where the masterclass is being held tomorrow. Piano Tuners are often the 'odd bods' of the musical world. They have fantastic aural perception, and the calm of 'Patience on a Monument', and must not mind the loneliness of working in solitary confinement, so to speak. This chap was a delightfully eccentric person, and who seemed to be living in the 1950's ! Not, you understand, that I think that is a bad thing - there is a great deal to be said for that quieter, calmer and less frenzied era - but he really was one of life's characters with the most crystal and sparkly ' received pronunciation ' that even I, having worked in the theatre world, have ever heard. He was rather more refined than Prince Charles, and marginally less posh than Lady Bracknell !

He wore the uniform of a 1950's fictional schoolmaster - a Mister Chips, or of a sweetly solitary prep school music master, who plays the organ each morning in chapel ! Tweeds and linen and paisley cravat.

He did a lovely job on the piano, which in fairness is not exactly a Steinway, and took great pains in telling us that it was approximately 1/8 th of a tone down, or 'doywn', and he was most 'appallingly sorry' that he could nothing about it !

Thank goodness, there is still room in the world for eccentrics ! We just don't have enough of them.

Don't conform - that's what I say!

PS There was no Costa......................still boarded up..................it had to be the Wild Bean Cafe....................my life crumbled.