Available Light

  The evidence is there and it's not good. Most people break their New Year's resolutions. On average, people hold out 'til January 19, apparently although about 8% of people manage to abide by their self imposed strictures for a year or more.  We make New Year's resolutions because there's bits of us we don't like and because we fall for one of the most common misperceptions that people  have about themselves: that our failings are just a matter of  will power and that if only we had a bit of discipline we could all smarten our individual and corporate  acts up. Bah humbug, I say.  There's a French saying,  tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner . To understand all is to forgive all. This is profoundly true. Pretty much everything we do, we do for a reason. What trips us up is that a) our reasoning is faulty,  based as it is on inaccurate premises and incomplete information and b) our reasoning is usually completely invisible to us. So we notice t...

Last night I participated in a symphony. Clemency's extended family (and therefore, of course, mine) gathered at Helen and Alan Edward's place to see the new year in by performing Haydn's Toy Symphony aka Cassation in G major for toys , 2 oboes, horns, string and continuo . We didn't have a lot of oboes or horns but there was a piano and a clavier and for the rest we made do with recorders, electric guitar, bass, a violin, a bird whistle and a lot of rattles, drums and other things that could be whacked or shaken by musical illiterates such as myself when someone who knew what they were doing gave the nod. I sat with 7 year old Emmie, and drank red wine and ate quince jelly and contributed my part to the wonderfully structured mayhem. Gilbert giving a virtuoso performance on the nightingale decoy We have always been a close family but an hour of making music together means we are somehow even closer. Such is the miracle working power of noise. Earlier in the we...