Ilkley Baptist

Fool! It wasn't Mercury, it was Jupiter. Oh well, I can still look for Mercury another time.

Meanwhile, today, in Bradford, in the wintry cold, I saw a blackcap, and heard its merry song, on a tree near the ChinoThai place.

On Tuesday afternoon, about 4.30pm, while driving down the A65 past Addingham, I saw Venus over the moor, intensely bright, and below and to the right of it, a smaller light, which was Mercury. I've never seen it before. I believe it will get closer to Venus over the next few weeks.

Opus 34 is the Piano Quintet, and I fulfilled a long-held ambition recently, when I played two of its movements as part of a chamber music group, this week.

Playing the piano is an immediately satisfying thing - you produce the whole piece of music yourself. But it's lonely. You generally make music alone. I've long wanted to play with other musicians and, through the kindness of a friend, was recently introduced to a group of local amateur musicians. The pianist was happy to move over for two of the movements and let me have my first go at doing this sort of thing. It was wonderful. Exciting, challenging, tense and joyful all at once.

And what a piece to start with! Brahms' Piano Quintet is a piece I've known since my teens. It's one of Brahms' unruly early works that, like the First Piano Concerto, didn't easily find its best form. It is a powerful, complex and rich piece. I played for the two inner movements, the slow second, and the driving Scherzo. That's an incredibly exciting movement, with relentless rhythms breaking into emphatic march-like tunes, and a middle section (Trio I suppose, though it's not in triple time) that contains one of those typically Brahmsian broad tunes. Mellowness multiplied.

Yesterday I saw a flock of waxwings in Addingham. I was walking beside the river Wharfe, near the suspension bridge that takes you across to Nessfield. It's the first time I've seen waxwings. They are immediately recognisable birds, very attractive, quite tame, and filled the trees with sounds reminiscent of electronic phone ring tones.

They're a new species for me, bringing my lamentable total to 128. Nine of those were added this year, though, so it's a growing list.

They have also inspired me, after all this time, to restart this blog. Over the months of silence, the things that have made me think about adding a post have mainly been matters to do with natural history: the weather, the moss on the moor, birds and insects. So perhaps I need to think again about the purpose of this blog.

Mark Haddon's book was a gift to me by one of the loal vicars; thanks Paul! It's been a great read.

It tells the story of a wedding and the build up to it from the point of view of four participants: the bride, her father, her mother, and her brother. Her father, George, is the main character and as the wedding approaches, the stresses in his life lead to some very odd behaviour and a serious disengagement from reality - a mental breakdown.

In some ways it reminded me of Tom Sharpe's great comic novels of a generation ago. George is an anti-hero not unlike Henry Wilt, with a very individual approach to the world. But the humour of Haddon is of a different sort, much gentler, much more intimate. We are taken inside the heads of his charaters, and this is what makes the book compelling.

And it is compelling. I had to pick up my car in Skipton yesterday; it had been serviced. So I took the book on the bus, read it as I walked the half mile to the dealers, then sat in the car in the car park finishing the last few pages.

It's also notable for something deeply unpleasant George does to himself with a pair of scissors. I'm not usually sqeamish, but this so affected me that my fingers became almost too weak the hold the book and continue reading!

Highly recommended. Heart warming and wry, with, incidentally, a few well aimed cracks at fundie Christianity.