Sunday, August 14, 2011
These old Etonians get everywhere
Following my energetic participation in 'Happy birthday', decided that I needed up my game a bit with a bit of Mozart, the K378 violin sonata to be precise. A little way in, I further decided that I needed to support the ears with the score, so crack it out to find that it is one of those books which is organised by subject. So rather than telling you that K378 was to be found on page 99, it gave a series of musical fragments - each perhaps two inches or two bars long. Fragments came with neither K number nor key name but if you could spot your fragment you then had your page number. Sadly, even had I been sober, not very strong on fragment spotting. One other angle might have been the sonata serial number, it being a reasonable bet that the fragments were listed in some recognised order, but the loose record that I was using (Lupu & Goldberg) dated from before the era of boxed sets was well and truly under way and neither listed all the sonatas nor numbered the two that it was offering. But then I remembered that I did have a boxed set (Frankl & Pauk, see September 29th 2009), and yes, the booklet that came with that did list all the sonatas and by the following morning I had managed to locate the sonata in question in the score. And it was indeed a useful adjunct, nicely bringing out the subordinate bits of the duet that my audio equipment - both hard and soft - is apt to lose.
Along the way, I find out that my nice but battered, red leather bound Peters edition of the score had originally been bought by or for one T. Ogilvy of Eton in 1890. Google finds a T. Ogilvy Esq. of the Bombay Civil Service, but the date is not right. Other Ogilvys lack the T, so perhaps the owner of the score was not a sufficiently famous Ogilvy.
Having dealt with Ogilvy, resumed my ponderings about Kindles. The thought from Friday was that if I could get a Kindle and get all the classics on it for free as they are out of copyright or something, I might have a solution to our book shelf problem. Several metres worth of said classics could be passed onto Oxfam, secure in the knowledge that if I ever wanted to read them again they would be sitting on Kindle. I would then be able to get the various piles of other books dotted around the house onto shelves and out of the way of the vacuum cleaner.
Next stop Google, where I find that Kindles only work off wifi, something which we do not have. Bit of a downer.
Next stop Staples, where I find that Kindles are very small indeed. A very clever bit of kit I dare say, but a bit small for comfort. I don't need to be able to tuck the thing into my jacket pocket, so miniature does not do much for me, apart from strain the eyes and my hand-eye coordination. Furthermore, so small that there was no USB port. I deduce that the only way to get books onto the thing is to wifi them. And even had I been tempted, Staples were out of stock.
But this morning, a second wind. Ask Google about wifi and after a bit find that while my BT Broadband does not come with wifi, as a valued customer I could have access to something called BT FON. It was alleged that there were two FON points in our very road, very near us in fact.
At which point, I decide that this is probably enough for a bit of kindling, and take the plunge. The device should arrive in a few days. Elected not to spend half as much again on a snappy leather case. BH can now doubt knock up something suitable out of a bit of surplus curtain.
I close with something for slug lovers. Yesterday, on Epsom Common, the rain had brought out the largest slug I have seen for ages. Green-brown job and it must have been at least four inches long, not counting the horns. Not all that fat, but long. Which some way to making up for the present poverty of slugs in the compost heap: not absent but not many.
# posted by Jim @ 3:21 AM 
