Well, the first week of March brought me a fair few things to see and do.
It is nearly twenty years since I last attended a performance of Mahler's Symphony No2 Resurrection. That evening was an event since it took place days after the trauma of the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It also marked my first encounter with Gerard Schwartz, who did not last long as Chief Conductor of the RLPO.
From the opening tremulando basses to the final choral ecstasy, Mahler 2 is a journey through despair and loss towards a redemptive reclamation. It's an amazing way to traverse 90 minutes.
Schwartz did not do the piece justice. Petrenko, as I hoped, did.
His Mahler is not all affect. He has an instinct for the deeper spiritual purpose and he handles the orchestra with a classical clarity rather than opting for a Bernstein-like welter of ramped up emotion. His approach is patient allowing tensions to build and subside before finally unleashing a glorious vision of joyous acceptance in the final five minutes.
I won't be attending the third or fourth symphonies in this cycle but I am looking forward to five and six later in the spring - that is, of course, if the worried classes are proved to be wrong and the world does not grind to a pandemic fuelled halt.
Ross went to therapy with Leanne in the MerseysCare centre near the library. I'm trying to encourage him towards being more confident about acting independently so part of the plan is to get him to travel one way on his own. We have scouted out best routes for him to take. Today, I drove him there with the scooter in the boot of the car and, after the session, he made his own way back via a coffee and a piece of cake somewhere en route.
As a society, we still get very antsy, quite rightly, if anyone advocates racial purity. We're increasingly averse to a lack of appreciation of the implicit fluidity with regards to sexuality. Maybe it's about time that we started to discuss whether or not we think it's acceptable to advocate gender purity.
But then such thoughts get a slap in the face from other enclaves among we humans. There are times when I feel such utter shock, despair and revulsion by what some men believe is the next, best thing for them to do. This was one such occasion that I stumbled across on social media today.
Meanwhile, niece Mary has just celebrated her 21st birthday at Uni with a bit of a bash. And, by the look on his face, that's certainly what her current boyfriend intends.
The Met's cinecast of Handel's Agrippina proved to be great fun in David McVicar's sylish updating. Joyce DiDonato was exceptional as Agrippina but the show was very nearly stolen from her by the coke-fuelled Nerone of Kate Lindsey.
Mum suddenly got a bee in her bonnet about getting to see the Prince of Wales aircraft carrier whilst it was in the Mersey. I know that it would be moored at the liner terminal and that there would be no parking anywhere in the vicinity. I also knew that there would be crowds of people such as might disconcert at 92-year-old woman. Frankly, I didn't fancy it.
This caused a bit of a huff until I suggested that I could take her to Everton Brow thinking that we should surely be able to see such an enormous vessel from that vantage point. In the event, we couldn't but mum was absolutely delighted with the park that is there now. I got a lot about this area used to be all houses and how so much has changed. And yet, she was delighted to be able to look out over her city with a certain regal hauteur.
Linda, meanwhile, has been using some free time to chase down further sites of historical interest in her quest to uncover her direct matrilineal forebears. The earliest she has so far is Sarah Evans who was baptised at All Hallow's Church in Whitchurch, Hants in 1832.
Sarah is known to have worked as a silk weaver and Silk Mill in Whitchurch is still used for weaving today as a craft.
I've also been encouraging Ross for some time to make suggestions about things we might do together and, at last, he came up with a suggestion.
And so over to the Lady Lever Art Gallery on the Wirral for a presentation of some of Matisse's Cut-Outs in an exhibition called Matisse: Drawing with Scissors.
Three to four rooms displaying about 40 works - so a good range without being crowded and many famous pieces on display such as The Snail as seen to the right.
Certainly not as large as Tate's blockbuster Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs back in 2014 but much more approachable as a consequence.
For me, one of the highlights of the show was another chance to see a selection of the Blue Nudes series. I first knew these works in the early 70s from the front cover of the first Penguin edition of Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex.
The image was the blue nude on the left of this photo. It holds a special place in my heart.
In fact, over my teenage years Penguin Books and the front covers of classical LPs gave me a much enhanced if arbitrary Art History education.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable small exhibition.
And a triumph for Matisse.
On Friday morning I dropped Ross off at Karen's studio at the Bridewell near the Royal Liverpool Hospital and he spent a good part of the day in a wholly art-related environment whilst I luxuriated in being at home on my own. I'm so glad we don't inhabit a one bedroom flat on the sixteenth floor of a tower block. We'd both be very challenged on all levels of our beings.
That evening, the Prince of Wales left the River Mersey and sailed off for more seas trials. Luckily, I hadn't listened to a certain amount of false information circulating from mum's direction so I took her down to the waterfront and her week ended happily by watching a big, grey ship pass by.
