Last night, as I now have a perfectly functioning little music system in our kitchen (useful when I have to do a lot of food preparation and/or cooking, let alone eating) I decided to turn my attention to our main living room. Here when I surveyed a little bookcase that we have underneath a window, I realised that we were still storing a clutch of operas recorded on VHS for which we have absolutely no use as we do not have the technology to play these upon, so they were just occupying some valuable shelf space. Once the shelf was cleared, I found that it would just neatly accomodate the Boombox (CD player with integrated radio) I had acquired recently and was very impressed by its sound quality. A few experiments, though, revealed that although the Boombox plays CDs beautifully and in the kitchen the FM radio could pick up and play our three favourite radio stations (including ClassicFM), this was not the case for the lounge. Here, the unit could pick up and play ClassicFM, the little inbuilt aerial for FM could not pick up either Radio 3 or Radio 4 in this particular location. I was not too distressed by this, however, as the Boombox plays both CDs and the 200 classical tracks from my old iPhone and I only paid £15 for it about a month ago in any case. I then relocated a DAB radio which I had purchased over four years ago and scarecely used – there was a type of logic behind all of this as after a serious operation some four and a half years ago, I imagined that I would spend a lot of time recuperating in the garden and I would probably value the companionship of a portable DAB radio. But I made a much more rapid recovery than anticipated and hence the radio was underutilised. Now, though, I am bringing it into much more constant use as I can use it together with the BoomBox as a ‘de facto’ little music centre, located at the other end of the lounge to our main HiFi system and the TV. Also, the little bookcase contains some boxed sets of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart (the latter a collection of some 40 CDs) so we not only have another little music centre but also all of the music that we would want to play in a proximate location. To finish off this little reconfiguration of our audio within the household and did a little hunting around and found a pendrive (USB stick) which I had just labelled ‘Bach’. When I examined it on the computer, I think there are about 60+ tracks which I think is the equivalent of about three or four music CDs. I then tried this out on our new little Panasonic music centre in the kitchen and found that it played this beautifully. So this wonderful little system, can now play music from four sources (the DAB+ radio itself, the CD unit, Bluetooth from wherever (my old iPhone) and now a pendrive. So this makes this little sysem incredibly versatile. Now that I have rabbited on so much about all of this audio, I suspect that I won’t mention it again – once you have little systems set up that functioning well and need no further enhancement or improvement, you can just forget all about them)
Meg and I went down to Waitrose this morning where, quite unusually, we only bumped into one of our usual Tuesday morning crowd. Undeterred, we had our midday coffee, did a little shopping and then made for home so tht I could get ready for my Pilates class later on in the day. When I walked down into town, I bumped into our Italian friend with whom I chatted for a brief 4-5 minutes and then passed one of our Irish friends and then later on passed some of our older Irish friends, to all of whom I could only make a quick ‘Hello and Goodbye’ as I did not want to be delayed for my Pilates class. The class contained the usual five members including myself but one of our number is a regular horse rider and had experienced quite a disturbing, not to say frightening, incident the day before. She had been out riding when a dog let off its lead shot in front of the horse and barked its head off – the horse took fright and bolted, with my classmate hanging on for dear life until it had calmed down from its gallop to escape. I asked her how long she had been hanging on and she replied that it was for about a mile! Fortunately, she had not fallen off but was a little sore in various places having been astride a bolting horse and I think may have been experiencing a little delayed shock. We all expressed our concern and relief that she had not been injured but had come of this little incident completely unharmed. After that, it was return to home, a lunch of fishcakes and ‘instant’ vegetables and a quiet afternoon waiting for the all important England-Wales match in the World Cup this evening.