I awoke yesterday morning to a day filled with a beautiful blue sky and wonderful sunshine and, according to the weather forecasters, the day promises to be one of the warmest of the year and is projected to rise to about 17°. I was a little delayed this morning because some of the short-hand links that I use to access some photos and videos were not working quite as they should but I managed to get these working after a certain degree of fiddling around. The day in prospect today is quite a full one because as well as visiting the Methodist Centre in the middle of the town I also tend to go out and do my weekly shopping. Later on today, I am due to viit a house of a U3A member for a meeting of ‘Classical Music Appreciation’ I have absolutely no idea what is involved in this group or what our activities might happen to be but, no doubt, I shall soon find out. At the moment, following the advice of my University of Birmingham friend, I am joining lots of groups organised by U3A at the moment and will then whittle these down to a manageable number once I have found the most conducive ones. The major trip that has been organised for us, and to which I signed up within minutes, was a trip organised to the telescope of Jodrell Bank and this will be the highlight of next week. So far, I am in a Classical Music Apreciaton group, Conversational Spanish, a Curry Club dining group and regular activities organised on Saturday morning each fortnight so that is certainly enough to keep me going. I also go along to church each Sunday morning with the bonus of tea and biscuits after the service and this is an opportunity to meet parishioners who of course a cross section of all ages. Now that the weather is improving, regular grass mowing will start next week and I also need to get out and do about 30 minutes of gardening each day, as there is a lot to be done. The evening before last, I watched the last of the series of programmes on modern Europe presented by Katya Adler – I knew that she had good French and German but her Spanish was equally good. Then the programme revealed that she had lived in Spain for a period so this helps to explain why her Spanish seemed equally as good as her other languages. I am in a slight dilemma at the moment whether to try and get a brief holiday in Spain in the Autumn but in the meantime I am a little tempted by another coach holiday to Scotland in the Autumn because it is only half the price and one gets picked up by coach from the centre of town which means that a lot of the hassle of travel is cut out for one. The coach company which is organising the trip to Scotland in April seems to be praised by everyone to whom I speak about it and one only hopes that the weather is not going to be dire. One of the trips is a boat excursion on Loch Lomond which I have never actually done before but I used to camp on a large island opposite Balmaha in the days when I went off to scout camp as a teenager.
Later on in the morning but a little later than planned, I went down and did my weekly shop. This turned out to be quite a ‘light’ week not least because I am sharing the meal preparation with my son and daughter-in-law whilst they are staying with me as they having a kitchen re-fit. I knew that I needed to get home and the shopping unpacked and then a light lunch because this afternoon, I was due to attend an inaugural meeting of the Classical Musical Appreciation group, set up under the auspices of U3A. The meeting was to be held in the house of the convenor and there were about a dozen of us altogether almost equally split between men and women and some of whom I knew by sight from the Methodist meeting centre. My daughter-in-law very kindly agree to drop me (and eventually to pick me up again) by car, as we unsure what the parking situation would turn out to be. After a rather tentative start, we soon started to gel as a group by speaking about the influence that had led us towards classical music. Some of us had been introduced to classical music as a formal part of the school curriculum, others by being played pieces in a school assembly and several of us via the medium of film (e.g. ‘Fantasia’) We decided upon a format in which at our next meeting, there would be three of us each presenting something from our experience that we thought that others might appreciate and enjoy. At our next meeting in a month’s time, I have volunteered to be one of the three presenters and said that I would prepare something on some of the classic Mozart arias. This really will be a labour of live for me because it gives me the opportunity to explain the context of the aria before it is played to the group. I will probably pull the pieces that I need off the internet and then perhaps put them on a website so that I can play them as I need and the rest of the group can listen to them again should they so wish. After a couple of hours we finished our meeting with a cup of tea and upon chatting with one of the other ladies in the group discovered that we had both worked in the same civil service establishment (what was then called the ‘National Lending Library for Science and Technology’) although separated by a space of eight years. So this was an amazing coincidence and is the only the second person I have come across who has worked in the same establishment (the first being a former student of mine) It was fortuitous that I was part of the initial meeting of the Classical Music Appreciation group and I am sure that there is an enormous amount that we can both share with, as well as learn from, each other. One important by-product of the group as well as extending friendships we can also share knowledge of upcoming concerts and musical performances in the area and may even attend some of them as an entire group.