Good/Bad?
12 November

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It's a long time since I've been quite so glad to see a colleague as I was on Monday when Jill returned to work.

What with annual leave followed by compassionate leave when her husband nearly died followed by sick leave when she was involved in a car crash, it's been nearly six weeks since we last saw her. And everyone's work has suffered as a consequence.

In fact, I'd say that we were about two days away from complete meltdown as we struggled to keep our social training and various commercial training activities going. I've certainly felt pushed and pulled about as I've been changing my day off to suit the circumstances.

The bad news is that The Olive Tree looks as though it is about to close. We've been going there for lunch for nearly a year now and it's been a real haven of quality in that time.

We've also enjoyed the pleasure of Ollie's company. Ollie serves and waits on customers and is an all round good bloke. As well as possessing an alright personality, he's also irrepressively cute. Ross has been saying for almost the last twelve months that he would like to draw him at some time. I've heard this before with other people who have since passed out of our orbit, so this time I have blown his cover and have mentioned this to Ollie himself. Ollie was not bashful in the slightest so we'll have to see where that leads us.

In the previous post, I showed you Barack Obama and Lewis Hamilton with their tops off by the sea. For comparison's sake, I now also include Ollie in similar style.

Well, Lewis is still a liddle bit tempting but Ollie has my vote by a gnat's crotchet.

Last Friday, I attended a recital by pianist Radu Lupu, which was by equal measures enthralling, mesmerising, challenging and irritating. I felt that he trivialised the first two Beethoven sonatas but then produced an ending to the second movement of the Pathétique which gave me goosebumps. I mostly liked the elegance of his Schubert B flat piano sonata but then he would throw a mood away with some wayward tempi. His Brahms encore was sublime. But you'd have to say that it was good despite the bumpy parts.

Come the Saturday evening, Ross and I were at FACT for a live relay of John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Ross probably enjoyed the work more than I did. I felt that Peter Sellars' libretto was self-indulgent and, certainly in the first two scenes, could have done with deft pruning. Musically there were some very good moments but, then again, there were some tremendous longeurs.

Gerald Finley was sensational in the title rôle of J Robert Oppenheimer; Sasha Cooke was easily his match as his wife Kitty. I also liked the performance and the voice of Thomas Glenn who played Robert Wilson.

At £25 each, it was not a cheap evening out. However, it was certainly cheaper than going to New York. And it will also be cheaper that going to down to London to see the show at the Coliseum when English National Opera present it next March.

Today, Tuesday, has been a day for gardening - I was off today rather than Monday because of work complications. I've also surprised myself by producing a rather good pot roast. Who said that cheap cuts like brisket aren't tasty?

I've just finished reading The Sleep of Reason by C P Snow. I'd never pretend that he's a good novelist but he is quite a good chronicler. In part it is now like reading a social documentary of a bygone age. Snow is also very good at delineating the shifts of influence and power within a closed bureaucratic structure. Character, plot and motivation don't really do it for him.

Within the novel, there is a strand which is something like a take on the Moors Murders of the mid 1960s. I was too young to get the impact of them at the time but they have formed a background mythology to my adult life. What came out of Snow's novel was a consideration which had never occurred to me before and that was the intellectual impact upon the liberal intelligentsia.

Having fought the Second World War to slay the beast of National Socialism with the concomitant wickedness of the extermination camps, the liberal thinkers of the age must have thought that Europe could put all of that horror behind them as it entered the 50s and beyond. To find that a young man and a young woman could torture and kill five young people in the Manchester area and then bury them on Saddleworth Moor destroyed that innocent conviction. Wickedness was not the prerogative of the Germans.

I started but gave up on The Spire by William Golding. In my teens and twenties, I really liked Golding's work. Re-visiting this work about the construction of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, I just couldn't hack the overly symbolic schema and the heightened prose. The subject just got flattened by the weight of meaning being placed upon it. I did not like.