Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Fine work last night by Wigmore Hall streaming the concert by Jakob Jozef Orlinski, countertenor, so that I could see who was sitting in my seat. It is home from home for me by now, having been as many as three times, and I wish they would bring it nearer.  The highlight, as it would be on any programme, was Reynaldo Hahn's A Chloris which is not to underestimate any of the Handel or Schubert he did. While not everything they make available thus will be quite as much up my street, I'll look forward to their next kind e-mail telling me what they'll do next.

Meanwhile Thursday is always TLS day so that's to be expected but today is a bumper post - they come not single spies but in battalions - with Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat and Sean O'Brien's short stories in the long awaited Quartier Perdu.
Having had the latter on order for as long as I can remember, Amazon eventually e-mailed to say they couldn't get it and cancelled the order. How surprised was I then to find it was out and about and had been for a while. Sean shares the distinction of longest awaited book with the ongoing anticipation of the re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning. His essays The De-regulated Muse were more than three years from being announced to actually arriving. Quartier Perdu hasn't quite achieved that, Monday Morning is putting in a strong challenge and I now see that the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus isn't due until 2020 so there's a book that sets its stall out early.
But all are safely gathered in in due course with the likely exception of the biography of Thom Gunn that I understood to be in the making but that was so long ago now I'm sure it must have been abandoned. And now that some have arrived, it should be a worthwhile weekend, certainly without any sport on telly as a distraction.