Disgressed

Last year I got myself a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and I have been using them on my commute ever since.

It has to be said that carrying around a full-sized set of headphones is not ideal in every respect.  I’m not particularly bothered these days about looking like some kind of idiot (though I tactfully refrain from wearing the headphones while accompanying Elizabeth to the bus-stop), but I did initially suffer some inhibitions about putting the things on and off and fiddling around with them in public.  Repeated experience, and the gradual acquisition of the ability to remove them and put them away in a case while holding a bag and a season ticket at the same time have made this easier.

They are pretty good, though it must be acknowledged that ‘noise-cancelling’ is something of an exaggeration. A colleague who owns a pair had led me to think that all external noise would be magically erased once you switched them on, but this is not the case.  External sounds remain audible (unless drowned out by music), but they are reduced and somehow made much less intrusive and annoying. Somehow I haven’t had chance to try them on a plane (the one we took to France was too small to have an in-flight system), which is a shame, since they came with an enticing little bag full of lots of adaptors for all sorts of machines, including old-fashioned two-prong plane sockets; but it is said that they significantly reduce the stress engendered by hours of plane engine noise, which I can readily believe.

The other question about it all is of course the perennial one of what to listen to. I have developed a bit of a problem in this area. The childish pleasure of listening to ‘Road to Nowhere’ among the seething commuters has not yet palled, but in my case it’s mostly classical stuff. To my mild surprise I find I get stuck in grooves, listening to the same thing again and again for days or even weeks. I don’t mind too much with the Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor because I’ve always thought of that as one of my Desert Island Discs, something I could cheerfully listen to every day.

But then the other day Katharine asked me why I kept humming Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture.

“I think it’s a nice piece of music myself,” she said, “I’m just surprised you’re so keen on it all of a sudden.”

Well, the proximate reason is that I’d listened to it every day for two weeks. But it’s worse than that. Much worse. The shameful truth is that it had become the soundtrack to a short mental film, actually the putative title sequence to non-existent film about a revolution in an imaginary East European country, based on the memoirs of the eventual Communist President’s daughter; she is an unreliable narrator who thinks her father is perfect, but we see that he is actually an atrocious tyrant.

Hum. Now for one thing I don’t really like getting programmatic about music. I know Beethoven said it was alright to think of titanic battles and mighty heroes while listening to his stuff if you really wanted to, but I can’t help feeling it’s not really doing justice to the music. For a second thing, how come I know so much about the putative novel on which the putative film is based, to which this is the putative title sequence? Have I spent that much time thinking about it? Couldn’t I think about something worthwhile, or better still, nothing, or even better yet, the damn music? For a third thing – the title sequence? Not even the film itself? Fourthly and worst; you mean it was this which made poor Brahms so much more enjoyable than heretofore that you wanted to listen to him every day, sometimes twice?

It took a bit of effort to confess all that, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Passacaglia, for example, now accompanies a film based on The Glass Bead Game, a fairly faithful adaptation in which however the elderly Tegularius is taken to be the un-named narrator, and his close friendship with Knecht and apparent lack of a girlfriend is discreetly highlighted in a sensitively tragic manner, while the business with Designori and his son is made to make a bit more sense. I know a lot about this adaptation, but it’s not an adaptation by me; I think it would have to be by someone from California, in spirit at least, in order to attain the required level of earnestness, which is way beyond my range.

I mean – what? What?

This is not going to stop any time soon. I have now acquired a set of in-ear earphones. They’re not quite as good as the Boses, of course, but they’re a lot easier to carry around and use, which means listening time can be somewhat extended.

I think I’m going to get it fixed in my mind that Beethoven’s Third Symphony relates to a film about Napoleon,  before something far worse pops up.

What do you wear? The weather has an uncanny knack of changing rapidly (the last week has been freezing, but today suddenly?seems to be the warmest for two or three months) or hovering on that treacherous temperature where you don’t quite know whether a scarf will be a necessity or a tiresome burden.

I had a problem last week when I was unable to find the removable lining which goes in my coat (the very one you can see up there to the left. Perhaps it’s time I got a new one)?. Not in the wardrobe, in the cupboard, or anywhere else it could naturally be hiding. The frustrating thing was that I had had it only?a little while before, when I put it in to cope with an earlier cold spell. But where had I put it afterwards?

In the end I had to ask Katharine, which I don’t really like doing because it plays into that whole thing about men having to ask their wives where their car keys are.

There’s an element of truth in that stereotype, of course; it often turns out that Katharine knows immediately where something is that I’ve been looking for for hours. But there’s a reason for that. It’s because she constantly moves things around. Sometimes this?is called tidying, sometimes it isn’t, but the effect is that only the female head of the house knows where anything is. I’m sure it’s basically a territorial thing, not really to do with?systematic arrangement of things.?Moving a book from a desk to a table does not?amount to tidying. The ultimate example came a while ago when I was looking for?- what was it? – I think my driving licence. Not in my jacket, in the drawer, in my coat, in the car.? At last, I shouted downstairs.

“Have you seem my?driving licence?”

“It’s on the mantelpiece.” (I’m sure I didn’t put it?there)

So?I looked on the mantelpiece and sorted through the old postcards, cheques, letters, and other bric-a-brac.

“It’s not on the mantelpiece.”

“No, I put it on the table just now.”

“You put it on the table??Why?”

“I thought it would make it easier for you to find it.”

So the truth is, in my heart of hearts I couldn’t help suspecting that the lining of my coat had been moved.

“It’s in the red box in the cupboard.” she said.

This is another?curious?tidiness practice – things are deemed to be tidier if they are in a box, even if they then take up more room than before.

“No, it isn’t. I looked.”

But of course I had to look again, so I emptied all the hats, gloves,?and scarves out of the red box so that I could tap the bottom theatrically.

“Well, that’s where I put it in November.”

“November? No, I’ve had it out since then. I put it in the coat?a couple of weeks ago when it was cold and then took it out again.”

“Well, where did you put it then?”

A fair question, I must admit.

In the end I had to wear the coat as it was – with the help of my new scarf it?was actually fine; I didn’t feel cold at all. Brisk walking helps, of course, and if you’re walking to the bus stop with Elizabeth it’s going to be brisk. So I hardly missed the lining: but of course,?as soon as the weather?got warm,? it turned up again.

“I found?the lining to my coat,” I announced yesterday over dinner, “Can you guess where it was?”

“In your coat?” asked?Katharine and Elizabeth simultaneously.

Yup.?

…I say? somewhat belatedly.? On a purely personal level, it seems likely that 2009 will be a material improvement on 2008. Katharine has finished the active part of her treatment, is doing well, and this week went back to work for a few hours for the first time.

On the technical front, I need to move this blog and Conscious Entities to a new host. Overall, that’s probably a good thing, but the process of transferring domain names and WordPress installations is going to involve me in messing around with MySQL and stuff I have not previously touched (only at the most elementary level, but I just know there are going to be unexpected complications and sudden gaps in the information available).

I intend to go with Conscious Entities first; if it suddenly disappears for anything up to a week – well, you’ll know what’s happened. Thanks for your patience, as they say, although there are times when I wish they would explain how I could best go about withholding it.