Paper serviettes

Gottagopractice, you asked what paper serviettes were! Well, here they are. What do you call them ? They are for afternoon tea - not to eat, but to delicately dab one's lips on and discretely hide an item of food one does not wish to consume. They are ideal for surreptitiously spitting cucumber into though personally I like cucumber. Occasionally a hostess will generously wrap a piece of party cake into a clean serviette for a child, or Grannie back home. Perhaps they are very English, on the other hand, maybe you call them napkins and do similar things with them!

Busy

My lovely daughter is spending a fortune on a new kitchen. I don't begrudge her the quality, the gadgets, the workmen doing it all for her. She does so much 'entertaining' at weekends as well as weekdays and gives so much pleasure to so many people that if anyone deserves a state of the art kitchen, she does. My kitchen is 23 years old, and looks it. I don't do nearly as much cooking as she does, in fact, since he retired my husband does most of it. He is happy in there, with a few cracked tiles, a floor we occasionally trip over, disgusting blinds, dodgy cupboard hinges, and a sad space that used to be our dog's spot but now is home to an ancient chest of drawers filled with old cutlery, place mats and paper serviettes that used to belong to my mother which I am laboriously working my way through.

Whilst M is ruminating over where to put the built in steam oven, microwave, the controls of the hidden radio/music facility etc etc, I am cogitating over which colour blinds to have from Trading 4 U. She has a drawer that hides bins for recycling, food waste, and something else, and we are contemplating whether we stick with our old pedal bin that constantly pirouettes in the corner so that the pedal is never easy to use. She now has a built in wine cupboard with temperature control for white as well as red. Ours is all together in the cupboard under the stairs.

The reason for my absence from the blogoshere is connected to this state of affairs. I am working my way round the kitchen walls, floor to ceiling, washing tiles, painting doors and skirting, swilling out the refuse that collects in the window frames. My husband has been laying a new floor because the folk who were booked did not come up with the goods, so we had to choose again and decided to do it ourselves.

I could go on...and on.....But I won't. Suffice to say, my cello practise routine is shot to pieces, I have a lesson this evening and what about my thumb position?

Catching up

It's rainy today and I am feeling smug having checked my bank statement, filed and shredded papers, sorted some stuff for recycling and am now posting this. I did not realise how long it has been since posting anything. Actually, I already wrote this an hour ago, and when it was posted I could not find it at first, and then discovered it lurking on my blog BELOW the last entry!! Out of order! How did that happen? Anyway, I could not change it, so deleted it and here we are again. There is undoubtedly a simple reason it happened, but don't ask me. I am incapable of plumbing the shallows of my own IT skills. I would drown.

Tenor clef is losing some of its terrors, but the A-string still sets my teeth on edge when I get to 'f' or 'g' and above. However, when I think back a year and remember how anything above the open 'A' caused my fillings to loosen, I realise I have come far. Also, there is the pleasure of discovering new fingerings on the 'D' and finding a harsh phrase can be mellowed by changing strings. I must persevere, though with the 'A'.

I have been enjoying 'Greensleeves' by Vaughan Williams and thought I was playing it rather well (tenor AND TREBLE clef included) until, that is, I played it with my teacher and discovered that her sharps, flats and semitones were different from mine! There are many subtleties in a tone or semitone, aren't there? I have an old video of Tortelier playing a scale the Western way, then in the Eastern way and then - I think - in the Russian way. The differences were amazing. So, it's back to the drawing board for me and my English way.

That tenor clef book

I promised the details of the 'Tenor Clef is Easy' book I am finding helpful. Here it is: Dr Downing's Tenor Clef is Easy by Sandra Downing. It can be found on http://www.drdowningmusic.com/ . I am finding it a great help, though I must say I am finding the 4th piece harder to learn in the bass clef before even attempting the tenor translation. Anyway, onwards and upwards...


I am enjoying the respite from the fast and furious pieces we play in the orchestra and am enjoying my goals of tenor clef and better tone quality. I am not entirely sure of my progress on either really, but know I am not going backwards. I was all set to book in a day in Lewes to play early music with the people I mentioned a while ago, whom I heard in the Chapel Royal in Brighton called String Theory Cello Ensemble. However I have decided to miss it this year and promise myself a week next year, all being well. I just feel too squeakily A-stringily amateurish, and am having a bit of a crisis of confidence.