I had a good day today.

Catherine is away at a barbershop jolly, and has taken the kids with her, so I am at liberty to plan my own weekend selfishly ;) In the morning I went into town to get a haircut and do some shopping for food and also some building materials – it’s glorious weather here, so I was buzzing around with the ragtop down, with a blast of U2 thundering from the speakers :)

Whilst I was waiting in the barber’s, I read a few more pages from one of my current reading list, Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. I am constantly refreshed by the vigour and elegant simplicity of expression, coupled with extraordinary intellectual precision. What a man, what a giant – where would the USA, where would France and modern Europe be without him?

Over lunch I read The Times, and the extraordinary images of yesterday’s appalling instalment of the farce that was once the best railway system in the world was graven into my mind’s eye.

This afternoon I spent building a wall destined to be part of the back wall of my sitting room, to hold wall-to-ceiling bookshelves; it was pleasant in the sun, and I had the radio on to satisfy my need for “input” hi, Nova Robot! After some pretty forgettable R&B I tuned into Jazz Record Requests, and heard the vintage Potato Head Blues by Satchmo, and Bix & Tram (see here for details: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/jrrn.shtml) and later some very cool Charlie Mingus amongst other good stuff. Late afternoon turned into evening, and I broke off for a beer in the lowering sun: Radio 3 was transmitting La Vestale by Gaspare Spontini – a wonderful opera that was completely new to me, recorded in London a week or so ago. The plot concerns a girl who puts love before slavery to an oppressive orthodoxy, and who is finally saved from the wrath of the priests by the intervention of the gods, who naturally side with true love. hi, you! The producer, Francesca Zambello, was interviewed in the interval, and was extremely lucid about the dual interest of works of art revisited for the twin reasons of assessing their contemporaneous impact and also for measuring their current interest to modern auditors.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/opera/lavestale.shtml

With Mum away in Oz for the duration, I invited Dad around for some supper – a quick chicken stir-fry with a Thai curry type sauce. We sat and drank an agreeable French wine with the meal, and talked about the incredible changes that his lifetime had encompassed; we were glancing through a book he had pulled out of storage, which was ‘The Silver Jubilee Book – The Story of 25 Eventful Years In Pictures’, presumably published around 1935, when Dad was 5. With captions made quaint by the passing decades, it encapsulates what the producer was saying about a dual perspective of interest: the straightforward photographic record of that tumultuous period of history is captured, with the additional insights of changing social mores underlined sometimes with tragic piquancy – the proud boasts about train speed records caught my eye, for example, as did news of major investment in the London Tube system. And as we sat chatting, a Beethoven Quartet played to us, courtesy of a recording made by the BBC two years ago.

As the evening got later, I put on a disc of Dave Brubeck, many tracks recorded around the time of my birth; when Dad went home the final tracks leached out into the clear night sky as I stood outside in the garden, enjoying a cigar and a last brandy. The fumes of the smoke and brandy blended with the honeysuckle scent from the canopy of Clematis Montana, and seemed to insinuate into the chopped rhythms of Brubeck and the lilting alto sax of Paul Desmond.

So apart from having drank well and deep of the blushful hippocrene, you may ask, what does all this rambling amount to? Well, I got to taking stock today, and realised that a fundamental constituent of what makes me who I am and what makes me better informed, sometimes deeply happy, always more aware of my fellow yuman beans, is this: that I count myself fortunate beyond price to have been born in the age of information.

From the two-hundred year old formative text, to the sepia photographs of WW1, to the news pics in a daily broadsheet, to the range of music I have listened to over the course of the day, to the manner in which I chat to friends over the web – all depend on storage media and technologies beyond the dreams of many generations of our forebears. What an extraordinary blessing this is, and how little we are inclined to give it due weight in our casual acceptance of our modern luxuries.

So, obligatory word post element! ;)

Are there any special words associated with recording (or data transfer of any kind) that are special to you in any way? And are there any particular media that you cannot imagine living without?