'Take Five' with Brubeck at the piano. What more could one ask for. Thank you BBC4.
Tuesday 30 November 2010
Monday 29 November 2010
wikiHow
I’ve just discovered wikiHow. Looks like fun.
I’m putting off finishing the article about the value of procrastination.
francis cameron, oxford, 29 november 2010
strictly
I think I’ve sussed the present format of Strictly Come Dancing. I used to know it as a dance competition. Celebrities teamed up with professional dancers in a competition to recognise the best.
Last year it began to change. There was the retired television news reporter who stomped his way to fame by dragging his barely clad professional across the floor. He had the grace to leave the show before too many much better dancers had been eliminated.
Now ‘tis changed. It’s no longer a dance competition. It’s a rather vulgar game show where an elderly yattering politician is encouraged to make an exhibition of herself in an expressed desire to win the coveted glitterball by a sad mockery of anything approaching a sense of time and rhythm.
I feel so sorry for the others who spend hours each week aiming to perfect dazzling routines.
What we have now is deception. But it brings more publicity than the BBC could ever have hoped for. Or was it planned that way?
francis cameron, oxford, 29 november 2010
Sunday 28 November 2010
Friday 26 November 2010
Thursday 25 November 2010
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Monday 22 November 2010
Sunday 21 November 2010
Saturday 20 November 2010
Thursday 18 November 2010
Wednesday 17 November 2010
Tuesday 16 November 2010
Sunday 14 November 2010
Rupert Brooke
A BBC QI fact of the day notes that when the poet Rupert Brooke ["If I should die, think only this of me .. "] was at Cambridge he was 'a leading member of the Neo-Pagans (a group of friends dedicated to camping, rambling and nudism).' It's worth posting this. I certainly had never come across it before. Does anyone else have any information about this group of friends?
september 1966
two weeks in september
I was checking over some of the old photographs in my collection. I stopped at an image of a woman asking directions from a policeman near the Seine in Paris. The file number showed September 1966. At first I doubted this could be true. Then it all came back.
It was the summer vacation for the Royal Academy of Music. My part time work as Deputy Director of Music for the Parks Department of the Greater London Council would be over at the end of the week. I could play the organ at the Church of the Assumption on Sunday, take one Sunday off, and be back for the following Sunday. I had the inside of two weeks for a holiday. I’d like to travel. We could take the car to France.
In those days the Automobile Association still had offices in central London. I went there first to enquire about car ferries. It soon became apparent I could do the job just as well by myself. So, early on Monday morning I drove down to Dover, bought cross channel tickets at the entrance to the ferry, and was in Calais in plenty of time to drive to Amiens and find a nice little hotel for the night. In England, if a car was parked in the street overnight, sidelights had to be left on until dawn. How do you find words to ask if that is a legal requirement in France? My schoolboy French found no provision for this vocabulary among the works of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. I compromised on ‘phares’ – though I had an uneasy feeling I might be asking about lighthouses – received a reply that satisfied me and left the car unlit. It was OK.
I had better fortune a few days later when my windscreen wiper broke in the rain. In the AA notebook I found the right French word and explained hesitantly to the mechanic that it was fractured! He glanced at my dear little old Austin, fixed a replacement (in the French style), accepted my francs, and we went on our way.
Our usual plan was to travel until about four in the afternoon and then find somewhere pleasant to stay the night. If we liked the place we’d stay for two nights. In that way we spent time in Beauvais Rouen Evreux Chartres and Paris. Hence the photo of the woman asking for directions. I have a vivid memory of driving twice round Etoile. According to my map we needed to turn right at the 13th street. Impossible! The 13th street was completely partitioned off for road works or some such. We did find a nice little pension nearby, had an excellent dinner in an unobtrusive café and slept on a mattress harder than any I’d experienced before – or since.
On the last night of our holiday we stayed in a seaside pension run by an Englishman. Escargots were on the dinner menu. It would be a new experience. Apparently I was not the only Englishman to enjoy snails for the first time in that restaurant.
francis cameron, oxford, 14 november 2010
Saturday 13 November 2010
Friday 12 November 2010
days of the week
Today is Friday which still bears the name of the Saxon goddess who came to Britannia with the ancestors of the English. Our other weekdays still relate to the Old Gods of those ancestors : Saturn Sun Moon Tiw Woden Thor. Perhaps the observance of Saturn Sun Moon overlapped from Roman times as the names of their divinities ‘ruling’ three of the more significant days of the week. And perhaps, in due time, it was local British women who merged their observances with those of their Saxon menfolk.
We read in the First Book of Moses how the world was created in six days so that the Creator rested on the seventh. And that’s how we come to have a seven-day week with the Sabbath as our day of rest. We probably think of it as a Jewish idea. It is – but it’s one of those brought back from Babylon when the Captivity was ended – and from there it made its way, via the empire of Alexander the Great, to the Roman Empire of Constantine who decreed, in the year 321, that the law courts and the markets should be closed and silent on each Day of the Sun.
We can still see reproductions of the old diagrams with the Earth as the centre of a series of concentric circles, each circle being the path of one of the heavenly bodies influencing the earth and its people, each heavenly body being the manifestation of an ancient divinity. In the Latin language their names are still with us ; dies solis, the day of the sun ; dies lunae, the day of the moon ; dies martis, the day of Mars ; dies mercuri, the day of Mercury ; dies iovis, the day of Jupiter ; dies veneris, the day of Venus ; dies saturni, the day of Saturn, the father of Jupiter.
I find it interesting that the Latin names tend to imply distant gods with homes in heaven whereas the Saxons – and, later, the Vikings – kept constant company with their gods. That’s why, today, Wiccans can still say with confidence : we step into the world between the worlds and we are at one with the goddess and our gods.
francis cameron, 12 november 2010
Thursday 11 November 2010
Wednesday 10 November 2010
Monday 8 November 2010
bright and breezy
It's a gorgeous clear bright wet windy morning in Oxford. Laus dea ac deo. Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
Saturday 6 November 2010
Friday 5 November 2010
Wednesday 3 November 2010
Tuesday 2 November 2010
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