The 'Messiah' Inheritance

 I began, but soon abandoned, a piece on my apalling journey last Friday as the victim of not only GWR - the Ghastly, Wretched Railway - but also First Bus whose combined efforts to delay my progress from Portsmouth to Swindon for as long as they could succeeded in setting a new door-to-door record of 6 hrs and 45 minutes. That compares with my best 1990's effort by bicycle of 4.11 although I must admit that one gruelling ride into a force 6 headwind for much of the way took me 5.30.

You don't want to hear about that, about how GWR are brilliant, absolutely brilliant, at apologies and announcements but nowhere near as good at putting on trains. It's a shame, really. It's like they have their priorities wrong. It's like me claiming to be a 'poet', if I ever do, and then producing so few poems but at least I don't expect to be paid. 

We will see about all of that.

 

The rewards for battling through to Swindon were richly rewarded and one of several gorgeous highlights, entirely unexpected, was being presented by my mother with my grandmother's Messiah score, as sung by her, as signed in her immaculate hand in Nottingham maybe 100 years ago, it's hard to say. Such editions weren't dated then like they would be now. 

It is entirely in keeping with family tradition that this falling-apart, much-used and much-loved edition comes to me who has, in such unlikely fashion, carved out some sort of role as a 'music writer' ( !!! ), and being as thrilled by Georg Freidrich Haendel's music, in whichever spelling of his name you prefer, as the generations of my family that went before me were.

That, I'd like to propose, is an inheritance worth having. It will be preserved more carefully and more lovingly than any other artefact in this library or archive that I live among because, yes, of course, there's any amount of poetry books signed by their authors and precious things laid all about but they're not my grandmother's Messiah, are they.