Fever

– Feeling any better?
– Don't know. Maybe. For now. But who knows?
– These things can take a lot out of you. Rest, and recuperation, and plenty of hot sweet tea, are what's required.
– It seems such a waste. I've spent half the day in bed, when there are so many things to be done.
– There's not much you can do about it. Viruses can be pretty overwhelming. You have to let nature take its course. All those little antibodies. And white blood cells. Besieging the virus particles. And tearing them limb from limb.
– Yes... Aren't viruses much smaller than white blood cells? Is there much for a white blood cell to get hold of?
– Perhaps they just swallow them whole. It's best not to worry too much about the technicalities, but just let your body sort things out. You're lucky, in a way.
– Lucky?
– To have been afflicted over the weekend. Hopefully it'll all be over by Monday morning. There's nothing worse than having to miss work due to illness.
– Yes... Is there really nothing worse?
– Think of the meetings you might miss. The emails going unanswered. Getting behind in your – filing.
– Still, if I'm not feeling a hundred per cent...
– Besides, there's nothing better than coughing and sneezing all over your work colleagues.

Coronation

I was fitted for a new crown yesterday. That comes across as rather grandiose: as if merely going about my day-to-day business wearing a crown wasn't enough for me that I actually need to have one made to measure, rather than just pick one up off the peg, at the crown shop. Unfortunately, the reality was, as always, rather more mundane. And not because I was after a run-of-the-mill crown, the sort you would wear every day to the office rather than reserve for special occasions, one that you hope doesn't attract too much attention, but blends inconspicuously into the background; on the contrary, I was not getting the kind you wear at all, but one of those that is used to repair a fractured tooth. And things do not get much more mundane than repairing fractured teeth.

You would have thought it was a straightforward enough business: a few deft measurements by the dentist, a nugget of gold hammered into shape on his fiery anvil, a spot of glue, and there you have it. But no, it seems a somewhat more involved process, requiring filling my mouth with quick-setting putty, possibly in order to get a realistic cast of my teeth; which seemed over the top, as I'm sure my teeth look pretty much like teeth generally do. And then he had the audacity to charge me a huge sum of money for the privilege. You could have got a real crown for the price.

Treacle

I did some baking last weekend. It's worth mentioning, as it is quite a rare occurrence. There was the lemon drizzle cake a couple of months ago; but unfortunately that was something best forgotten. What can go wrong with a lemon drizzle cake? You would be surprised. Everything went wrong with that cake, short of  a guest appearance by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And that was only avoided because of a prior engagement.

But, to my eternal credit, I put the experience behind me and moved on. To be specific, moved on to trying my hand at parkin. I have just noticed that the spell checker has objected to the word parkin, suggesting that it doesn't exist in respectable, God-fearing dictionaries, that it is nothing but a misspelling of something as mundane as parking; which is a ridiculous suggestion as it clearly does not fit the meaning of the sentence at all. To tell the truth, I had a similar reaction when I took some of it into work, to share among my colleagues. Surprisingly, several of them had never heard of it, even those who claimed to be Northerners, such that I had to describe the recipe in intimate detail. But they tried it, just the same.

Gallifrey

It has been, for no obvious reason, a day of incongruous anniversaries. It is the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. It is fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is fifty years (tomorrow, I think) since the first episode of Doctor Who.

I do not always find time to celebrate these things, but I have tried to make some effort over Britten, being one of my favourite composers. I went to see Peter Grimes at the Lowry a few weeks ago, a stirring performance involving lots of nets, or actually just the one large net, which I suppose was a powerful metaphor of the ties that bind the fishing community together while excluding Grimes the outsider. And I've got a backlog of celebratory programmes to watch on the television recording device thing. The recording device thing is also groaning under the weight of celebratory Doctor Who programmes, as there has been a deluge of them broadcast over the last few days. But they provide a fascinating reprisal of fifty years of popular culture, which would in a way be a potted history of my own life, had I not spent quite so much of it hiding behind the sofa.

Laser

It was Cat's substitute birthday yesterday. Nobody knows how old she is, and she refuses to tell. Radiocarbon dating may be the answer. At any rate, it is two years since she arrived here. So she is at least two, and more likely somewhere between three and four. It must be difficult to go through life with such large error bars on your age. It would be like me telling people I was somewhere between 40 and 60, but I couldn't say precisely. It's hard to believe they would be very sympathetic.

Anyway, as a present, I bought her a laser. It's probably a somewhat dangerous gift to place in the hands of a fairly irresponsible cat with little practical knowledge of experimental physics. So, to be on the safe side, I have taken charge of it. She seems happy enough chasing the beam of red light around the room, not being particularly perturbed by being unable to catch it. But she still keeps on trying; which I think says something about her character.

Python

I have been trying to get to grips with a Raspberry Pi donated by my son, who happened to find he was in possession of two, and did not think to start his own linux cluster. His loss is my gain.

There is something rewarding about getting back to basics with a lightweight, readily programmable computer rather than the over-engineered, application-heavy, wading-through-mud-with-leaky-wellingtons product that the modern Windows PC has become. Clearly, the Pi has the slight disadvantage that you have to take a few minutes attaching it to a television screen and keyboard and ethernet connection so that your living room becomes a spider's web of criss-crossed cables, which somehow takes the spontaneity out of things, and risks throttling any visitors who inadvertently stray into the room, but at least it comes with a giant red raspberry on its desktop. And I am sure, if you made the effort, you could write programs to run on a PC, but they would look small and shabby compared to the glossy titles you are used to. Whereas on the Pi, the home-made look and feel of your code is perfectly acceptable, because it is, after all, home made.

Many years ago, before the IBM PC became a feature of every household, I owned an Atari ST and wrote simple programs on it. These typically featured lines bouncing around inside a box, which doesn't sound particularly entertaining, but became rewarding when you had actually put together the code yourself. There was also a game where you flew a spaceship around blowing up asteroids, which demonstrated what could be achieved with a little more effort.

Athene

It was sad to hear of the death of Sir John Tavener yesterday: a composer who unapologetically poured out his Christian beliefs into his music, creating a unique sound world which mixed the mediaeval with the modern, combining the consoling melodies of Orthodox plainsong with an often disconcerting dissonance. The music draws you out of the stresses of contemporary life (in my case, I was listening while driving to work this morning, which is never the most uplifting of experiences) and leads you somewhere literally other worldly. It is not surprising that he should have proven to be so popular, touching a chord with people who otherwise cannot connect with classical music. A unique vision.

Dove

– And was the concert a great success?
– It's hard to tell. From where I was standing, it was difficult to hear much.
– I thought you were in the middle of the choir?
– Yes, indeed. You do tend to hear quite a lot of the choir, at least the people standing immediately next to you. But the rest of it – the orchestra, and the children's choir, and the soloists – disappear somewhat. Probably something to do with the acoustics, I suppose.
– But you could gauge the audience's reaction. Presumably you could see the audience?
– They do tend to stare you out, yes. I guess they looked fairly appreciative. Mostly.
– Wild applause?
– They never quite lose their dignity. But they seemed happy enough. And it was nice to see the composer there. You don't usually get that many composers turning up for performances.
– I suppose they tend to be busy people.
– I believe it was the first time this piece had been performed by amateur forces. Not to mention this far north. So not just amateurs, but northern amateurs.
– Altogether a unique experience. I hope he appreciated it.
– I think so. It's a shame it's all over: all that work, months of rehearsal, all over in a single evening.
– Such is art. Ephemeral.

Almost

After two months of frantic rehearsal, tomorrow evening sees our first concert of the season. It comes around sooner than you expect. To be honest, you feel a few more hours of practice would prove useful: would iron out some minor irregularities, such as singing the wrong words to the wrong notes, and coming in at the wrong time, and possibly even turning up at the wrong venue. The orchestra somehow seems to be able to waltz through substantial works with relatively limited rehearsal, whereas we in the choir require months of crawling through the score note by note, deconvoluting complex cross rhythms and making wild guesses at strangely shifting harmonies. But we get there eventually. More or less. I suppose that is the charm of live performance: you never can predict how it will turn out. And it never sounds exactly the same twice.

Oddly, my cooking is somehow similar: a recipe never seems to come out the same twice. I would never cope cooking in a restaurant, where, presumably, customers would expect the dish they ordered last week to taste the same if ordered today. But perhaps that soupçon of unpredictability adds to the occasion.

Souls

It is November already, when a moment ago it was summer. Or maybe a little longer than a moment. But not much. And before you know it –

So it goes. The rain is still coming down, seemingly not dampening the spirits of hardy folk exploding fireworks outside. Night comes early now, the drawing in of the year.

At work, they are growing moustaches. Not all of them, but a few. Perhaps I should have joined in. But I found it a mildly traumatic experience when I tried a couple of years ago: I spent the month worrying about how it looked, and how to get people to sponsor me. And, to tell the truth, there was not much to show for it, either in terms of whiskers or money, by the end of the month. And I find it is difficult when other people are so keen: the clamour and raucousness wears me down. You would have thought growing a moustache was a quiet, solitary experience. But no.