Charles Chaplin

It's easy to forget Charles Chaplin was also a well-respected composer, although his arguably most famous piece, the theme from the film, Limelight, is a tune many people will recognise though perhaps fail to put a name to.

I discovered a copy of the piano music for this theme in a box of music I acquired through FreeCycle. Here's my first draft of it as a piece for recorder quintet (Tr Tr T B B). Still needs a bit of proofreading, and most of the dynamics are still missing, but I think it'll work OK, and by the time Piping Hot Recorders reassemble after the festive season I should have a working version of it for us to try.

Listen to Limelight

This is an mp3 file created from the wav file generated by Sibelius Kontact player, so it's a bit artificial-sounding, to say the least, but somewhat better than a midi file I suppose. Not sure about the supposed 'recorder' sound, though: sounds more like flutes to me. I guess we'd better do it for real.

Nothing happened today . . . ?

I used to keep a diary when I was a kid. A page to a day, it always was, and at the start of each year I'd busily fill in everything that happened over the course of a day. Some days were full of things and others read something like this: " Got up. Had breakfast. Went to school. Came home. Did homework. Went to bed."

By the time February came along, those sort of days had degenerated into: "Nothing happened today." And by the beginning of April, most days would be completely blank. If a lot was happening in my life, I was too busy to write it down, and if nothing much was happening, I couldn't see much point in writing, yet again, "nothing happened".

Somewhere in the attic there's a box full of such diaries. Fully documented Januarys and Februarys, skimpy springs, and a big blank space for the rest of the year. Occasionally I'd write up my diary when we went on holiday, as there was no homework to do, and probably no TV to watch either, but other than that . . .

But is a blog the same as a diary? Probably not. And in those childhood diaries I suspect I had the wrong approach, anyway. It doesn't have to be a description of what you did all day, does it?
(Today - took the dogs for a walk in a waterlogged field; went to Sainsbury's; visited Steve's dad; watched yet more old episodes of Friends; read graphic novel; got legs squashed by heavy cat.)

So what is a blog for? Sharing my opinions with a largely uninterested world? Proving some sort of point? I really don't know. Why am I doing this? Um . . .

OK, here's a question: Is there any point in my arranging Charlie Chaplin's theme from Limelight for recorder quartet? Oh, wtf, I'll do it anyway. It's fun.

Stormy weather

Through the night the wind howled, the thunder crashed and the rain battered the rooftops. If you opened a window you could hear the roar of the waves crashing on the shore, just a mile away. I just couldn't wait to get down there with my camera!

There's not a lot else you can do in weather like this, and if you live near the sea it would be a crime to pass up such a fine opportunity.

Took over 200 photos in the end. Some of the better ones can be seen here. The sea is usually quite calm around here, so it was quite exciting to see real big breakers, crashing over the promenade or the pier. Anglers, hardy souls, were out in force in their gaily coloured jackets. I saw a swan, apparently surfing for pleasure, great flocks of seagulls (mostly the smaller gulls rather than the evil herring gulls) and oystercatchers.

Eventually the sun came out, making the big waves blue, but still just as loud and stormy. But the colour and quality of light that comes after a storm is quite beautiful, and even Maryport looked lovely for a little while.


It's a shame that Flickr was having an off day. Suddenly everyone was finding that only some of the photos they were uploading could be accessed, and chaos reigned around the globe for a while until they fixed it and we heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Laser cats

Picked up a laser level thingy in a sale for £1.87 - cheap fun for the cats! I've had them chasing it up and down for hours. It projects a line, rather than a point, so they don't know which end of it to catch. Great fun. And better still, it uses ordinary AAA batteries rather than those expensive coin-shaped ones that usually go into laser pointers, so it's cheap to run. I like it.

BODY PARTS PROBE!

Seen outside Tesco today
As my Aussie friend ObLiterated observed: "I bet the Coal Workers'll have something to say about having their body parts probed :)))"

FLOOD WARNINGS
Many people in this area are waiting nervously tonight for high tide, to see whether their local river will burst its banks (again) and flood their houses (again). It's the same places, too, that were inundated last time - the Warwick area of Carlisle, parts of Keswick near the River Greta, parts of Cockermouth near the River Derwent, and so on. The council knows what can happen, and yet not enough has been done, and people will once again lose property and have their lives disrupted. Of course it doesn't help that new houses continue to be built on flood plains.

This is what happened last time:

Above - Waterloo Street, Cockermouth, during the January 2005 floods.

On becoming a pack leader

Above: my pack
I'm reading Cesar Millan's book about dog psychology, Be A Pack Leader, which I got for Christmas. (Is someone trying to tell me something, do you think?) Having watched some of his TV programmes I can see where he's going with this: all I have to do is convince my dogs that I'm the leader, and then they'll be happy, well-rounded, well-behaved animals who will walk obediently behind me and never again get overexcited when they meet other dogs outside; Pace will no longer snarl if you come near her when she's eating; Ghyll won't try to eat the mail as it comes in the letterbox; Pace will at last be prepared to make friends with the cats; they will both sit quietly and benignly when the phone rings or a customer turns up at the door. It seems to involve saying, "tch!" to them each time they overstep the mark, but sometimes they're making so much racket they'd never hear it. Obviously there's more to it, but I've only read Chapter 1 so far so I haven't reached the clever bits yet.

Cesar Millan is Mexican, living in California. The 'Cesar' bit sounds Mexican enough, but 'Millan'? Has he got Scots ancestry, d'you think? He certainly has a way with dogs, but of course what he's really doing is training people, and some of the people on his TV series are as thick as they come, treating their dogs like children - no, no - if you treated children like that they'd be out in the streets causing riots.

I'd really like it to work. Both dogs have caused so much chaos in their own individual and not at all endearing ways that taking them out for a walk in a place where there might be other dogs about now requires a good deal of courage on my part. Sometimes the mental effort involved is all too much. Mostly they're brilliant dogs, but . . . if only they were more like cats.

Above: dogs should be more like this

NOT A PANTO EXACTLY . . .

. . . more a Christmas production, The Borrowers at Keswick's famous Theatre by the Lake is quite a clever version of the popular children's book. It's hard to portray characters who are small enough to live under the floorboards on the same stage as others who are full-sized "human beans" but they did a passable job of creating the illusion of different sizes by using a variety of techniques including our favourite - the miniature puppet versions of the Borrowers, whose little arms moved, and who seemed able to walk around the stage. We never quite figured out how they did that.

The kids loved it, and that's the main thing. Some of the adults, though, found the seats too small and too close together - Steve and I were both very glad to get up and walk about in the interval - me, because the seat was too high for my short legs, and Steve because there wasn't enough space for his longer ones. I seem to remember the seats downstairs in the stalls being a lot more comfortable - something to remember if you're planning to book there.

KESWICK SHOPS CLOSED AGAIN
Once again, though, Keswick missed a trick by not opening up for business on a bank holiday when a lot of potential customers were wandering the streets looking for something to do. I'd hoped to grab an espresso in one of the excellent coffee shops that have sprung up in recent years, but they were all shut. The few cafés that were open were doing a roaring trade, funnily enough, and the only other shops open were the outdoor gear shops, which, I suspect, never close at all, as of course there is a constant demand for yet more fleece jackets.

The Christmas Season

INTERNET DODGERS

The obvious questions are, (a) why would anyone want to dodge the internet and (b) assuming such people do exist, why do they need a café in which to do it? Oh, and is that somewhat pissed-off looking Santa one of said Internet Dodgers? At least they've got a satellite dish, so while they're studiously avoiding the internet they can amuse themselves with sky TV.

EVEN CHRIS IS AT IT NOW
Hmmm. Even Chris has now started a blog, and plans to write something every day! I can't believe he'll keep it up: well, I didn't manage it, did I? The minute life started getting busy, and things worth writing about started happening, I ceased to have time to write them down, and the blog got forgotten.

However . . . let's see which of us drops out first, eh?

CHRISTMAS DAY

This is Smokey Joe, my in-laws' new young lurcher. She's a nice wee dog, and seems - so far - well behaved.

Pretty decent Christmas. Nothing awful happened, despite having 8 people (with a 60-year age gap between the youngest and the oldest) and 2 dogs present, as well as 2 more dogs and 2 cats absent (i.e., left at our house while we had Christmas dinner elsewhere). Even finding the poor cats had been left outside in the rain all afternoon didn't cause any particular trouble. They just came inside on our return, licked themselves dry and settled down for the evening. Everyone got at least some presents they were really happy with, nobody was sick, nobody fell out with anyone else, and even my flat tyre was only a little bit soft and worked fine once we found a garage with a working air machine.

We are now looking forward to a family trip to see The Borrowers at Keswick tomorrow afternoon.