German poets in Cardiff

A truly dramaturgical evening yesterday - a mysterious invitation from the Modern Languages faculty at the University took me to Chapter Arts Centre, where an equally mystified group of poets had gathered. It turned out that we were to hear readings by the (former East) German poets Uwe Kolbe and Richard Pietraß. Kolbe is tall and lean and comes from an inland-waterway family, while Pietraß, a Berliner, looked properly poetical, bearded, bespectacled and beaming - translates Seamus Heaney, whom he somewhat resembles. Readings in German, English and Welsh, the latter mesmerisingly beautiful, by Mererid Hopwood, and clearly fascinating to the non-Welsh-speaking German poets. And to drink - provided by the generosity of Literature Wales - Blue Nun. Honestly. I haven't seen it for years. I wondered if it was a joke, but it wasn't. The poetry was much about purifying German after the war, and restoring words (like 'Lebensraum') to use. Today we have a workshop on translating poetry, and I'll bring my Ringelnatz and Morgenstern versions along. 

Nature notes from Bute East Dock

Hot weather brings out the carp, who come up into the Dock Feeder and the shallow water to spawn, frolicking about and leaping out of the water. Huge creatures over two feet long, with bronze scales and pig-like snouts. The grebe chicks are riding on their mothers' backs (two breeding pairs have successfully hatched their eggs) and the coots and swans are flourishing likewise. And so it was alarming to read (on a notice pinned high on a lamppost) that plans are afoot to start a Wakeboarding club on the dock, with a huge pylon and a 700m cable tow, artist's impression available on the web for inspection. I have written to the council to object (it will be noisy, disruptive to wildlife, and the dock is known to have a lively colony of toxic blue-green algae, perfect for surfing) and anyone else who wants to do so should email developmmentmanagement@cardiff.gov.org, quoting the name of the proposal, 12-00691/DCI.

Off to Buxton

Broke off from the (sublime) Tristan dress rehearsal at the WMC to go to Buxton to give two lectures on three operas tomorrow - so on the train from 6 till 11. The Maiden in the Tower (Sibelius), Kashchey the Immortal (Rimsky Korsakov) and Jephtha (Handel, and not strictly an opera). For anyone attempting to lecture on operas they haven't seen, the rules are 1) read the Viking Opera guide, 2) look it up on Wikipedia (can be surprisingly good on musical items), 3) find a libretto by fair means or foul, 4) check out Spotify for the rarer items, 5) pray nobody in the audience has seen the operas in places like Savonlinna, Wexford or other locations where rarities are commonplace. Oh, and 6) don't allow questions, whatever you do. Wish me luck.

Sermonise

Just discovered what 'Simon Rees' gives as a one-word anagram. Sums it up, really. My great-grandfather was a Congregational minister, so it's all in the genes. This evening I talk to the Ladybirds at Pantmawr Inn (just across the hedge from the M4, but good, I'm told) and tomorrow it's the Cardiff Gas Board Retired Employees Association who get the sermon, in an upper room in the Pentecostal Church, so watch out for stray tongues of flame. Tristan and Boheme, which should be a good mixture of love duets and untimely deaths. I shall also hand out as many business cards for Blomefylde and the Necromancer as I can get away with - and then watch Amazon Kindle for signs of life.

Complicite

Yesterday's job involved interviewing Annabel Arden about her production of La boheme. She's updated it to the years immediately before World War I, allowing the last flickerings of the Belle Epoque to cross over with the first sightings of conscripts in uniform. What was particularly fascinating was to learn of her background with Theatre de Complicite, and her training in Paris and Berlin in theatrical dance. This will have an interesting impact on the production, as there's a huge amount of choreographed movement in Boheme - I'd never realised until talking to Annabel that the four Bohemians form a commedia troupe in Act 1 and again in Act 4, cavorting around with parrots and herrings, making fun of each other in the style of the Lazzi used by the Italian comedians. Inspirational stuff - it'll be fascinating to see how it works out on stage.

Blomefylde hits the newsstands

Delighted to say that Darryl Webber's article on my Elizabethan sleuth Myles Blomefylde (star of his own Kindle e-book) has come out in today's Essex Chronicle. Follow the link http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/strange-tale-Mr-Blomefylde/story-15909851-detail/story.html
and read all about it. Who says Chelmsford isn't cool? The place is about to become a city, and about time too.  Home of Britvic, Marconi, Hoffmann Ball Bearings and now Myles Blomefylde too...

The Devil's Looking-Glass

Continuing the pursuit of e-fame and e-fortune, I've started scanning my old Methuen novel The Devil's Looking-Glass (proud winner of a Betty Trask award for Romantic or Traditional Fiction) so that I can turn it into a Kindle book. This involves scanning the printed novel, page by page, then putting the file through SimpleOCR, unscrambling the inevitable misreadings, correcting punctuation, and trying to get the thing to settle down on the page and make sense. Repeat 180-odd times until the job is done. But it's still quicker (just) than typing the whole lot in again. For those who remember such things, it was originally written on a BBC Micro computer belonging to my old college, circa 1983, and nothing from those days has survived in electronic form, or at least in any I can read. Drafts on a Remington Noiseless (ha, ha) typewriter, which sounded like a pneumatic drill three streets away. Oh, and three carbons. Gosh, it seems a long time ago.

Grilled fish

The reference in today's gospel - Christ appears to the apostles after the resurrection, feels hungry, and they offer him grilled fish - gave us the cue for this evening's dinner. Mackerel grilled over charcoal, with baked potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and roasting in the embers, definitely worth coming back for. Purple sprouting broccoli with a drop of sesame oil and Kikkoman soy sauce on the side, just perfect. Sitting in the garden (fifteen feet by thirty feet, in case you wondered) under the medlar tree with the wisteria in full bloom, as close to paradise as you could hope to get in Cardiff Bay. That is all we managed to get done today, but after all, Sunday is a day of rest, or supposed to be. Tomorrow will be fun, chasing interviews for Boheme and Tristan programmes, and seeing who's bought Blomefylde and the Necromancer from Amazon Kindle. Live in hope.

Chiminea

The lastest toy, a cast-iron chiminea in so-called calico pattern, has arrived by TNT (the courier, not the explosive) and I have assembled it with a screw-driver and a lot of sweat and toil. It stands four feet high, on three legs, and is a handsome copper colour. Inaugurated today with a trayful of charcoal, lit with rolled-up newspaper, and encouraged to burn to a good glowing heat, it successfully cooked two salmon steaks, which we ate with rice and Japanese turnip pickles. Oishikatta! To pickle a turnip, peel, slice and pack in a crock (along with its leaves if young and tender) with some salt, dried chilli pepper, kombu (optional) and lemon peel (also optional) and put a weight on top. Leave in the fridge for a few days till the juices flow and begin to turn sour.

CwpanAur coffee concerts at the Museum

A good lunchtime concert with the Badke Quartet - A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Tymes (an apposite title) both original and Maxwell Davies versions; Britten's Third Quartet and Mendelssohn's last quartet - written after death of Fanny Mendelssohn and full of grief and rage. Good audience in the plush semicircular Reardon Smith theatre. Afterwards, a stroll through John Piper's Welsh landscape drawings and paintings, bony dissected hills and rocks, washes in unexpected blues and yellows, nothing at all like his architectural studies, more reminiscent of Henry Moore's Sleepers. Grebes nesting (with two eggs laid) on the Dock Feeder. A map I bought in Bristol last week showed Cardiff Docks in 1915 - where we live was a railway marshalling yard, between the now-filled-in West Bute Dock and the still-water-filled East Bute Dock - so no greenfield site there. Coal dust black, more likely. As digging a few inches down still shows.

Bristol city and other English ports

And off to Bristol, after a weekend in Essex enjoying the aconites, windflowers, forsythia (named after Brucie's ancestor) and birdsong at three o'clock in the morning. Deepest Essex: traffic whizzing past at all hours, raucous pigeons and starlings; Cardiff Bay: profound silence broken only by the hum of the adjacent rod mill. I'll drop in on St Mary Redcliffe, Queen Elizabeth I's favourite church (or so she said when in Bristol) and swan around the waterfront until it's time for my talks. Last week in Plymouth: good weather for strolling on the Hoe, and shopping in Poundland and TKMaxx to replace missing luggage (you can get a perfectly good silk tie for £6.99 if you know where to look) and admiring the facade of the semi-derelict New Palace Theatre, another Frank Matcham masterpiece, but less well looked after than his theatres in Buxton and Cheltenham. An elderly Italian on a sidestreet north of the theatre had embellished his own house's facade with what looked like monumental masonry: great slabs of porphyry-coloured marble and granite, cut into shape and plastered into place. He told me he'd had the idea on turning 70. Why would you want to live in a mausoleum?

Off to Plymouth, where WNO is touring for the week. Pleasures of going to Plymouth include: the red rocks of Dawlish where the train runs along the shore; a martini at the Plymouth Gin Distillery; strolling on the Hoe with the last of the daffodils; a pint in the Dolphin, Beryl Cook's favourite pub, where the casks stand on trestles and there's always a coal fire in the grate; fish and chips on the Barbican quayside, and a fight with the gulls for the last bits of batter. Bliss!

Inauguration

A bottle of Prosecco broken over the bows to launch this blog. Day 1, Blog 1. I'm off to Birmingham to talk to a group of opera goers about Mozart and da Ponte, with special reference to da Ponte's origins in the ghetto of Cesena, and his arrival in Vienna. Looking forward to the train ride up the Severn, especially where the river widens above the old suspension bridge (a huge double aeolian harp when seen from the side) and there is a view up to the red house on the western bank. Gloucester cathedral seen across the watermeadows is another treat. Then something fiery in the ma po do fu line at a Birmingham Szechuan restaurant, the talk and a trainride home with loquacious colleagues. Bed before midnight, with luck.