Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

It looked bleak this morning when the CD player didn't work. It is customary to do the Times crossword of a Saturday morning to the accompaniment of something erudite. I began without music but had another look, grateful of the several years of good service from Sony but concerned that here was another item of bric a brac to dispose of and only the tinpot player upstairs until a new one arrives.

My practical expertise is nil. Things that don't work generally remain not working but I have heard of fuses. It was worth a try. It was a 3 amp that was required, not the 13 amp I first found. I suspect you blow the national grid or at least the neighbourhood if you use the wrong one. But then I, amazingly, found a 3 amp, put it in and Good Heavens, it came on, and the crossword was done to the soundtrack of further Bach cantatas. It's remarkable what can be achieved when one tries.

The Saturday Times crosswords, a few months ago, had been seeming to be getting just beyond me with a bit more internet help required than is respectable but I think that's six weeks in a row now all done and dusted with only the checking of answers I thought must be right. It's necessary to have a few interests so that one or two of them can be going well when others are failing.

Having set a new best ever rating at Bullet Chess, I switched to Classical and have, hopefully only temporarily, blown my 1800 standing there. 

Having got to within one more winner of restoring where I began the year on the turf, that went backwards, too. Then Corals asked for the ID I couldn't satisfy William Hill with last year and I thought, here we go, they've latched on to that sly way of effectively closing winning accounts. However, I've successfully taken a token amount out of them to represent a nominal profit for 2025 and I play on with the chicken feed that remains, but never officially losing.

So the crossword and electrical successes were welcome.

-- 

I'm up to vol. 44 of the Bach Cantatas by now, having jumped ahead to other genres, too, but I don't think I'm halfway. Of course, it's hard not to take gloriousness for granted. Paradise must be dull. 

This morning's programme began with BWV 140, Wachet Auf, which is famous and one wonders if it's better or just familiar or familiar because it's better. But then BWV 143 comes along with a very fine violin obbligato part representing another find that I might struggle to find again so vol.44 stays on the turntable for another turn or two. One needs to be John Eliot Gardiner to know your way round the Cantatas properly.

-- 

I don't think my basic Spotify access allows me to find my Spotify Age based on what I've played there but I'm not missing much. It's unlikely to be less than my real age but once one reaches a 'certain age', surely one is just 'adult'. Only someone limited to the likes of Bing Crosby or Bill Haley could be put in their 80's' a tendency towards 'classical' doesn't indicate old age and generations born after the 60's are known to enjoy the Beatles. If my favourite decade for music was the 1720's, it ought not to suggest that I'm over 300 years old.

A Spotify Age might only mean something if you're under 40, are Tim Westwood or had been John Peel.

--

But Elvis Costello's book is a 'good read'. He comes across as every bit as edgy as his slick, sometimes attritional songwriting. But he's deeply immersed in his music, a lot of which he owes to his father, Ross, who sang and played trumpet in showbands and wherever he got a break. And, graduating from the post-punk vitality of his first albums, he soon moves in rarified company, not namedropping for namedropping's sake but those are the people he met- McCartney, Dylan, Tony Bennett.

For me, he's who he was to begin with and what came later were afterthoughts, like Robert Plant was Led Zeppelin and the forty years since no more than a search for something else to do. But I doubt if they see it like that.

Elvis uses time in a very non-linear way, sometimes being married to Diana Krall ahead of writing the songs for Get Happy but he's an assured, confident writer of a book, as he always was with a song. 

The most quotable line so far, two-thirds of the way through, is regarding Mink de Ville, who were,

led by Willy, an emaciated chap, who traded heavily in mythic street stories that I didn't quite buy. His girlfriend, Toots, looked like a bag of old clothes that had been abandoned when The Shangri-La's left town...

It's interesting to fit in the times I saw him in action with the impressively recalled narrative but, as I found with the Seamus Heaney letters, all the travel, the appearances, the meetings with other greats. It sounds exhausting and I'm entirely with Larkin- not for the first time- and other less publicly available types in not relishing or envying the pursuit of such a career.