Winter-Spring 2023

Winter-Spring 2023

There is a strange feeling of fulfilment accompanied by a certain detachment. I find so much of the world on political and social levels increasingly deplorable that my basic wish is simply to disengage and find refuge chiefly in music, the arts more broadly, the beauty that is still be found in the remnants of nature, with my loved ones and with my pagan gods. We are again now at the farm in the Midi. Some days have been lovely, many chilly to cold, there has been mistral, and all is challenging to one extent or another. But we are here.

We were to drive together with Pierre and Catherine from Paris to the Provence, but they both tested positive for Covid-19 and were suffering. We had thought that Richard and I were to have a few days in Paris, but it had turned out that Pierre was to work on Monday and wanted to depart from Paris on the preceding Saturday – the day after we had arrived from London. So our reservation at Anahuacalli had been switched from Saturday evening to that of Friday, and we enjoyed the gathering with Marie-Laure, Meg, Toby and Pili & Robin. And rather unexpectedly we were then able to attend Marie-Laure’s birthday party celebration the following day: Jonathan, Camille & Noah; Robin & Pili; Sefania; Daniel & Jan; Ben; Jamie; the writer Chloe with her partner; and others who I know/knew and others who not. It was a feast – with Ben bringing delicious roast lamb that he had prepared. The TGV the next day south, and the following evening was Living with Bill Nighy at Penny’s – an excellent and

emotional film.

For much of the rest, there has been the burden of not being able to locate the car keys and the key for the safe deposit box at the bank. The short-term memory is not at its better days. Frequently, I need to walk back into the preceding room to try to remember what it was that I was about to do. All too often I do not even think about doing that and simply forget what I was about to do when some other task takes over the immediate focus.

The Trump saga and indictments are another worry. How much can the ‘political witchcraft’ accusations really be denied? How much is he actually prospering from the notoriety he is now having? How could so many people be insanely supporting him? I include him along with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, the military junta of Myanmar, Narendra Modi, Ali Khamenei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Kais Saied, Daniel Ortega as well as doubtless others among the most distressing anomalies of our present times along with the conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Central Africa and the precariousness of both Taiwan and Lebanon. But superseding even all this is the increasingly inescapable climate change catastrophe and global pollution of our planet. I pray for an effective collective wake-up. What likely chance is there for any of that?

So for me it is a savouring of the here-and-now, the presence of an Alp, the blossoming of spring, my favourite companion and the sonorous and rhythmic dimensions of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto in C minor, and Debussy’s Nocturnes. Herein I treasure my solace.