Oxford, Paris, and other things

 The Days , an account of the nuclear disaster that happened in Fukushima , is a series worth watching. " IAEA Experts at Fukushima (02813336) " by IAEA Imagebank is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 . You cannot stop comparing it to Chernobyl, but what a joke that was Chernobyl, with English speakers trying to speak with a Russian accent, well some of them anyway - how insulting that was. And yes, I know I know, some of the actors were great actors, but still... it reminded me of The Reader with great Kate Winslet otherwise, but the accent? No, it will not replace German. Funny that so many in the Anglo-Saxon world care so much about gender, fight against racism and cultural appropriation, and I agree with them, but nothing about true, in-depth cultural appropriation... the colonialism of English everywhere.  Is the film or series set in Germany? Oh well speak with a German accent. In France? And like in Chocolat get a French actress, with her slight accent, she's speaking...

 Listening to a sonata by Scarlatti, I'm struck by its strangeness, it even goes completely wild and you wonder if a small animal has not landed on the harpsichord.                                            Jean Rondeau plays Scarlatti sonata K175 in A minor And always still the little cells repeating themselves - I learned today, thanks to that wonderful programme on Scarlatti on the BBC, that Scarlatti liked to gamble. There is some madness in gambling, some obsession, some intensity. Composer of the week: Scarlatti, BBC programme with Kate Molleson Ceci explique peut-être cela, as we would say in French, this maybe explains the wildness in the music. Added to that, living for the remaining 25 years of his life in a dark palace, the Escorial with a King suffering from Melancholia, Philip V of Spain probably did not help. This is a connection though, not a causality. An...

 I won't say much about it, because it's all in there. A wonderful podcast.  Not long ago a Guardian journalist was asking her followers on Twitter about their favourite 'esoteric' internet gems. Well that's it! (And I was a bit surprised that some other 'gems' mentioned by others on Twitter are funny sites it seems but more time wasters than anything else... having said that I do waste my time on silly series often... Anyway... my point is... this is not a 'gosh I've wasted my time' sort of experience). It's called Preternatural Investigations by Sharron Kraus, worth listening to! " Sharon Krauss " by Goodnight London is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .  

  When the writer Marcel Proust ate a madeleine as an adult and ducked it in his tea, suddenly a whole moment of his childhood came back. Apparently it wasn’t a madeleine in the first drafts of his BIG novel (In Search of Lost Time), but toasted bread. Never mind, the madeleine and/or the bread did the job, the past came rushing back as if it were in the present. There was a bit of that when J. and I went to hear Sharron Kraus at the Port Mahon last Tuesday. I say I went to hear Sharron but there were two other set of musicians there I had not hear before: Sara Wolff and Helen Pearson and I loved listening to them all. A great evening of lovely music organised by Divine Schism.   But yes, there was definitely something spooky going on yesterday.  Because I was quite early coming to town from Abingdon, I decided to walk all the way down the High street from the centre and as I approached Magdalen College, and saw how many people were squeezed on the pavement, I reme...

Reading Alain de Botton still, The Art of Travel . I’m intrigued by his chapter on Wordsworth (what a beautiful family name for a poet!) how he claims that nature makes us better, that we are no longer competitive etc etc Alain describes leaving a meeting in London when he was taken by the usual human bullshit (is he/she more successful, more intelligent, more whatever better than me?) Before going to a concert in East Oxford, I had some time so I went walking in the near nature of the city. My bus stopped at the bottom of St Aldate’s, near the Court, and I decided to sneak into the path leading to Christ Church garden, then instead of turning right into the meadow (I did not have so much time) I went towards Dead’s Man walk ( don’t know why it’s called like that? Check it on Wikipedia! ) Obviously there is nature, or a semblance of it, that didn’t stop many rather disagreeable characters to be walking as if they were in the city of New York after a bad day in the office. I saw...

Everything is fine here.  There are no food banks, no kids who struggle to develop, no drugs problems, no one on the street, no racism, no religious intolerance, not even between Christians, no increase in rental, no rotten food on sale, no polluted rivers and lakes and land and cities. Everything's cleaned and well ordered.  New (or good as new) barges are being commissioned by OUR BELOVED STATE to welcome foreigners who wish to settle into the land. A perfect solution. With a bit of luck, some will walk in their sleeps or just jump straight ahead. No need for coffins and other funeral expenses. Straight into the water. Clean.                    " Catamaran Barge at Olmsted Locks and Dam " by LouisvilleUSACE is licensed under CC BY 2.0 . Clean streets. SECURE STREETS. Some criminals were about to cause a lot of damage on the day of the coronation of our new GREAT KING – long m...