Shorts and Falling Leaves
14 October

It's been unseasonably mild of late.

Not that I'm complaining. The sunlight has been a blessing after the rain of the summer. However, it's been dreadful for the farming community. The foot and mouth infections continue with the concomitant restrictions of movement for livestock around the country and now we have Blue Tongue.

This is not unexpected. Farming news has followed the disease's progress across Europe. It's been in Belgium for a couple of years now. The Channel has been the main thing impeding its steady march. But the midges are now in East Anglia. Unlike the viral borne foot and mouth, this disease is spread by insects. They've now made the crossing over the water. Only cold weather will kill the midges off.

In fact their presence is yet another sign of climate change. Up until a few years ago, it would not have been warm enough for the larvae to survive winters in mainland Europe. We should hope for a very cold winter all round. Current signs are not favourable.

Still, it's been the most glorious autumn for colour in the leaves and that, in its way, is a blessing. And the prevailing temperatures mean that most of the local youths are still showing their legs off whilst they continue to wear their summer shorts.

After my week of not doing very much, life has more or less plodded on. I've entered my busy phase at work with my main teaching commitment. This time round what with holidays and other projects, I'm unlikely to get much practical support from my colleagues. Luckily the customers under my charge are pretty biddable at present.

I've been following the second series of Making Music. I loved the first series which was broadcast earlier in the year. This series picked up the story of Western music from the mid-Victorian era to the present day. And as the history became more contemporary so, I have to say, I became less inclined to make the affort to enlist the serives of Radio on Demand to keep up with the story.

I've had two encounters with the Phil. Firstly, following some torrential rain on Friday, there was flooding at the Philharmonic Hall. They cancelled the Sunday afternoon concert that we were supposed to attend. Not that the Phil let us know. We found out by accident when checking for something else on their website. What is the point of taking contact details at the Box Office and then not using them? And surely they should be making patrons with disabilities a priority?

The following Thursday I was there for a concert on my own. The bill of fayre was a strange mixture but that was what had attracted me in the first place. Probably the best piece of the evening was Elgar's overture In the South which came out sounding like Strauss in its lushness. Next best was probably Respighi's Fountains of Rome which gave the orchestra another chance to show the mettle of their respective colours.

Thereafter things were less good. Verdi's overture to I vespri siciliani was too taught and not flexible enough in its pulse. The strings sounded scrawny and undernourished as well. And the final item, Puccini's Messa di Gloria was not genial enough. And perhaps we are beginning to see the limits of Vasily Petrenko's abilities. Good for the Russian and German traditions. Not so good with the Italians.

Come Sunday and it was bees for the children. We had a splendid meeting. There were some seven young people and seven adults including the two beekeepers in the room so it was crowded. We looked inside a hive, talked about the types of bees, dressed up in the beekeeper's outfit, learnt about smoking out bees and made candles. I was exhausted by the end of it all.

My continuing love affair with books from the Oxfam shop continues with my purchase of The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín. I'd really not heard of this author before - well actually I had when I came to look at other works he's done. Anyhow, Colm Tóibín's wasn't a name I immediately recognised. This book was so special, deceptively simple. A young man is very ill with HIV-related illnesses. He spends a weekend on the Atlantic Irish coast with his sister, mother and grandmother and two friends. They all talk. Nothing is resolved. And, if that is not your sort of read, you will dislike it enormously. Me, I was captivated, entranced, moved, stimulated, engaged, etc, etc.

Ross and I also watched Pride and Prejudice which was a delight from beginning to end. Brenda Blethyn made sense of Mrs Bennet as being dipsy but nevertheless clear sighted about her future if her four girls did not marry well. Donald Sutherland was less good as Mr Bennet but did give us a fey-minded romantic who thought that things would work out - of course, they do in the story but in real life he would be a right royal pain in the arse. Matthew Macfayden was excellent as Darcy as was Keira Knightley as Lizzie Bennet. We liked Simon Woods gaucheness in the rôle of Mr Bingley - he was very different as Augustus in Rome - and Rupert Friend was an adornment in the rôle of naughty Mr Wickham. All the girls were splendid and Judy Dench put in one of her fine cameos. Joe Wright's direction had a sure eye for period and tone throughout. Excellent entertainment.

I've also, thanks to Colin, read my non-fiction book of the year - The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan. This was a wonderfully readable and yet erudite story of the development of human understanding and agreement of the science behind the calendar. How and why you might want to know the exact length of the calendar year for example. And how you would define it. It's not as simple as it might seem and depending on the definition you choose then the year is slightly different. What is most astonishing is how, with only limited resources, people where able to gauge increasingly accurate approximate answers to these questions thousands of years ago.

This book engaged with big ideas and offered a big picture view of them. And it's an approach which I love. Take this, for example.

This saga of ideas begins six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It then moves to ancient Greece, only to hopscotch to India during the great Hellenistic surge that accompanied Alexander's armies in the fourth century BC. The ideas then arc back west centuries later, landing in the great centres of Islamic learning after the Arab conquest of Persia and India. The Arabs in turn carried the knowledge to portals in Spain, Syria and Sicily, where it made its way into Europe, to be embraced at last by pre-Renaissance thinkers such as (Roger) Bacon.

What you get a sense of is how culturally interdependent we all are when you strip away the foolishness of nation state rivalries. For example, if you are using Roman numerals, there is no concept of zero. MMVII stands for decimal 2007. The MM tells you that there are two thousands. The VII tells you that there is a five and two single units making seven. There is nothing to tell you that there are no hundreds and no tens.

It takes mathematicians in India to explore the concept of zero which is then taken up within the Arab universities. And it takes other Indian mathematicians to come up with the idea of numeric notation in columns, thus allowing for a growth in the understanding of addition, subtraction and multiplication, and giving us the birth of maths as we understand it and, very importantly for the development of Western mercantile practice, bookkeeping.

I loved this book.

I was less sold on Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin although I liked it more than Winter Queen which I read earlier in the year. I don't know. I read it. It was OK. I kept turning the pages. But I'm not sold on the franchise in the way that the dust jacket blurbs tell me I ought to be.

Ross and I have had fun re-sealing bath again. I had a try when Ross was in Barton in August and it seemed to work. But no. We can argue about whether or not it was my inferior craftsmanship or a duff tube of sealant but the real upshot was that the first attempt did not work and so we had to do it all over again. We have purchased a whole new mixer system but I simply cannot contemplate getting that job done until we have the bedrooms sorted. I just feel that, should it go wrong and we have nowhere to wash at the same time as we are sleeping in a junkyard, then I shall simply give up the ghost.

Then came the Erddig apple festival. Or rather it didn't. We saw this advertised last year and, for reasons that escape me, couldn't make it then. We've said that we wanted to attend the festival this year and it's been in the diary for some six months now. But increasingly I've felt that all of the energy for attending was coming from me and, though Ross would be happy to go, he really wasn't making any positive contribution to making it happen. And I just don't have the energy. I can't do it for the both of us.

We did manage a trip to the Plaza cinema for Atonement which is such an excellent film. It has layers upon layers about truth and understanding and love and lies and misunderstanding and guilt and reconciliation and fact and fiction and memory and reparation and redemption. It is handsomely mounted. The scenes at Dunkirk are just stunning and the long tracking shot which everyone talks about is absolutely mesmerising. It's probably the best thing that I've seen Keira Knightley do along with Pride and Prejudice. James McAvoy is very good as the servant's son made good who is destroyed by a lie. As well as being unconventionally cute, he has an amazing actor's face over which ideas and thoughts and feelings skim with deep clarity. This is one of my favourite films of the year and, in time, I shall seek it out on DVD.

One of the big achievements of the year for Ross and I has been the way that we have taken up swimming on a weekly basis. Mostly, we go on a Monday lunchtime when the pool is mostly clear. A couple of time recently, we gone when I have come in from work first thing in the evening and it's been really fine to swim and watch the sunset gild or rouge the sky over North Wales.

I had another interview for a job in the health service. This would have been for a training job based in Ormskirk. It had quite a bit going for it apart from the extended hours and reduced pay. I didn't get an offer but I'm glad that I can still make the grade for interview.

Ross went to Nottingham to see Chris and stayed for a few days.

As well as producing art together, the two of them have fancied the pants off each other for nearly a decade. Well, the two of them have finally got it together.

I had thought that they were going to make the great leap when Chris moved to Devon and Ross visited him there. But, though not chaste, they avoided full on pleasure.

Well, not this time. First, the bed. Then, the shower. Then, the leather couch. Then, the bed again. My Rossi returned with a real spring in his step. Apparently, he'd been top man throughout the weekend. I can't imagine Chris being able to stop a pig in an alley for quite a while.

Finally, I have to note that I have polished off another book by Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down. I've been a fan ever since reading About a Boy over a year ago. I can't think of anyone else who could make a comedy out of the interwining lives of four potential suicides. I laughed. I was moved. I enjoyed the four different voice/perspectives. I loved the prose styles. All in all, it was an excellent read.