8-4?
29 November

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As long-time readers of this Journal will be more than aware of, I take an interest in the coming and going of the sun.

Yesterday was an interesting moment of the year. Here on Merseyside, sunrise and sunset coincided with my official working day - the sun rose as I (notionally) began work at 8am and set at 4pm to herald my departure. It will be mid-January before we have more than eight hours of daylight again.

The weather has begun to favour the wintery. Here on Merseyside today, the temperature has barely risen above freezing and there has been a bone chilling fog all day. Last weekend, snow swept down the East Coast. Colin provides photographic evidence of snow in Lowestoft. It's not many months since I sat on that patio in the late afternoon sun sipping a cold beer.

The early part of the week brought what was in effect a crisis budget. The answer to economic downturn provided by the Conservative Government of the 1980s was to allow unemployment to climb as a way of putting a downward pressure on prices and wages. The current Labour Government has decided to follow the Keynesian answer of spending your way out of recession. However, at base the response appears to amount simply to encouraging even more borrowing and spending. As a way of protecting jobs, this is a disappointing methodology even if it is a laudable aim.

And the news keeps coming in about the parlous state of the world economy. And we keep being told that the United States of America is the world's leading economy. And we keep being told that the collapse of the sub prime market and its effect on the world's financial systems which is evidence of this.

I remain unconvinced. I'm sure that the economies of China and India are much more significant these days. Why, for example, are oil prices dropping? Petrol prices locally are now down to 88.9p per litre. This is not because of over-production or the efforts of the USA because future demand in China and India has slumped.

Similarly, re-cycling plants in the UK are now producing too much product. We are storing the output in old MoD premises. Why? Well, once again, future demand in China and India has slumped and there is nowhere else to offload it.

Business news on the Radio 4 also gave me the snippet of news that imports in containers through Southampton decreased this autumn.

I wonder about the lead time here. The drop in the number of containers arriving from China in October would have to mean fewer ships sailing from China in September. In turn, this which would have to mean fewer goods being manufactured in the previous 3-4 months. So, what we are really looking at is the knock-on effect of fewer orders being placed in March/April at about the time the Northern Rock affair was really kicking off.

Enough people in retail were that prescient.

And the overall effect was to knock the stuffing out of the Chinese economy.

So, perhaps the Chancellor's idea to decrease VAT is way to get people to buy Chinese imports so as to prime the global consumer economy.

On Thursday, I went to another RLPO concert. I was disappointed. After the string of good concerts, I suppose there was going to be one sooner or later which did not rouse my enthusiasm. I did not expect it to be this one as it contained a selection of Beethoven's incidental music to the play Egmont and then his Symphony No 9 Choral.

What went wrong? Well I can't fault the four vocalists. I've not heard mezzo Anna Burford before but she was fine. Emma Morwood stood in for Joan Rogers in the soprano part and sounded much better than as Suzanna in that awful Marriage of Figaro with the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra in February. Andrew Kennedy can have a bit of a bleat to his tone but I remember him well from John Taverner's Requiem in March and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love a couple of years back at ENO. Best of the four was Garry Magee who I've heard give two outstanding performances in the title rôle of Don Giovanni with Opera North and Welsh National Opera.

No, they were fine and the orchestra did everything that was asked of them and did it well. No, the problem came with the conducting.

I first heard Vladimir Ashkenazy play the piano live in 1973 in a performance of Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto. The conductor that night was Andrew Davies who I heard conducting at the Phil earlier this year. A few years later I heard Mr Ashkenazy perform a complete set of the Beethoven piano concertos with Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. I have the programmes for these concerts. He is a great performer and some say he is a very good conductor too. Not on this evidence. He kept rummaging around in the score as though he kept losing his place. Everything was hard driven and joyless. No, I was not impressed though others were and cheered him to the rafters. I suspect they applauded the name and the premium ticket prices rather than the performance.

AS well as books, my local OXFAM shop also stocks the usual range of clothes, bric-a-brac, Fair Trade goods and cards. It has a small selection of black vinyl discs, cassette tapes, DVDs and CDs. Although I look occasionally, there's rarely anything to tempt me. But I pounced on Andras Schiff playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. It is tremendous. Worth ten times the £1.99 I paid for it.

I should also note that I've applied for two more jobs - one at Edge Hill University and one at my old stomping ground of Liverpool John Moores. It's not that I am specifically wanting to return to the Higher Education sector. It's simply that that is where I am seeing the interesting jobs at the moment.

Ross and I are gradually making preparations for Xmas. We've ordered the tree and bought new lights for it. My parents will be staying with us over the Festive period. We've been making lists of the things that need to be done. After all, I have my mother to please.