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On or about 12th December we went to hear Schubert's late quintet, a matter reported at the time, but which the blog search button does not recognise. It is visible to Google proper but that returns a month at a time which is less than ideal. The point of all this being that we now have a sparkly new CD of a sparkly but not new performance (by the Alban Berg Quartet) to play on the new CD player. Very good it is too, rather less mushy than my elderly vinyls. One of which is a French printing of a Decca recording recorded in Great Britain, a printing which must be quite old because the sleeve tells one nothing about the Weller Quartet and confines itself to a fairly short piece about the music, which looks to have been adapted from the English of one T. Eastwood, an old Etonian. From a time when executants did not need to strut quite as much as has become the custom since.

I think my brother would have approved of the half of the short piece about the quintet because, while being a teacher of music who also played, he was also rather uneasy about his business of having to wrap up the music he loved in words. To deconstruct it.

I was not able to find out anything about the quartet this morning, but they must have been reasonably grand as there is still a market for their wares.

The other cultural event was prompted by watching 1.75 of the 3 episodes of 'Great Expectation' during the holiday. I missed the other 1.25 episodes - the ones in the middle - as I found Pip altogether too unpleasant a character. Now Dickens is a writer whom I try from time to time and have hitherto failed to get on with, but on this occasion I saw fit to download another freebie onto my Kindle from Gutenberg and I am now 49% (according to the progress bar at the bottom of the screen) through it. And while I am reminded of why I find Dickens hard, I am also rather impressed of his unsparing portrayal of Pip, who looks to contain a good deal of the author. Also a rather more rounded portrait than it is possible to get off on the box, even in three hours without the adverts.

It also strikes me that the obsession with class with which the English - if not the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish - are often accused, is, in part, a product of social mobility. It is precisely because that in 19th century England there was a lot of social mobility, that we were so interested in all the stresses, strains and tell-tale signs which that mobility gave rise to. In a more rigid society it would be easier to pay less attention to such matters.