Ilkley Baptist

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.

Ian McEwan's novel Saturday was a present from my sister for my birthday. When people ask me what I'd like for a present I quite often ask them to give me a book they've enjoyed themselves.

I enjoyed reading it, too. It's about a day in the life of a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. The day happens to be the day when more than a million people converged on London and marched to Hyde Park in protest at the proposed war on Iraq. Henry doesn't join the march, he thinks he probably supports the case for war, but he plays squash, has a minor car accident, nearly gets beaten up, visits his elderly, demented mother, hears the rehearsal of his son's new song, cooks seafood stew, welcomes his daughter and father in law to the house, and is subjected to a violent break-in, during which his wife is held at knife point.

McEwan's style suits a single day, because he is very interested in the working of people's minds, the nature of their consciousness. And of course, so is a neurosurgeon. McEwan will often describe the thought processes of Henry, the vague feelings that don't quite reach consciousness, the motives that push him towards a decision, the considerations that half come to attention, and the physical sensations and emotional resonances that colour it all: then he'll add that all this took only two and half seconds!

The plot is troublingly far-fetched. The two key events are Henry avoiding a beating by diagnosing his would-be mugger as suffering from Huntington's chorea and, like some seer, throwing this at him, and later on, Henry's daughter, Daisy, disarming the same mugger, now threatening the family with a knife (and accomplice) by reciting Dover Beach to him.

The day is a counterpoint to the question of the war on Iraq, and it also dabbles in the troubling questions of how we make decisions, and what it means for people to lose their minds to dementia. It didn't illuminate these questions much for me, but it does provide a starting point for thought.

The thing I think I shall remember the longest is the description of Henry's son, Theo's, music. There are a couple of passages in the book that I think contain the best description of music I've read, and there is real warmth here. Something lacking from the rest of the book, I thought. I didn't warm to Henry at all.

I went to the Parish Council tonight. Another boring meeting for a clergy representative, sitting in the dark on the back row while the councillors, bless them, drone on correcting minutes and saying there's nothing to report, or so I thought. I could hardly get in the room! Ilkley Residents Against Tesco Encroachment were there. Not particularly irate, I must say, but cogent and resolute, determined to oppose the re-siting and massive enlargement of our local store.

I must say, I agree with them. I wonder if the churches in Ilkley should get stuck in, too. Interestingly, IRATE thought it might be too political for us. I think that community issues are our sort of politics, though. I'm not sure I want to oppose Tesco as such (though their fairtrade record might be a bit weak), but there comes a point where consumerism and capitalism stop supporting democracy and liberty and start being destructive. We need to learn the meaning of 'enough,' and I think the churches might want to voice concerns.