October 2018 Review

I used up one of my many outstanding week’s leave, and did various bits of clearing up messes in the house, had a health check from the Gym’s GP, and settled into my new Wednesday evening routine with my commitment at the Soho meeting.

Wait. What was that again? Health check? You know, like blood panels, testosterone, body fat, medical once-over involving being poked and prodded, blood pressure and pulse, all that good stuff. It’s one of those things one should get if one has the money or the insurance coverage, and I wanted to be sure that there were no major changes in my body chemistry that might account for my recent feelings of blah. Turns out there isn’t, but I did get a whole bunch of blood test strips just to make sure that the reading I got that morning was anomalous.

(OK, since you ask, I have a pulse oximeter, a blood-sugar reader, and an electrical blood pressure reader. Any time I use them, I’m so damn healthy it’s not true.)

For no reason I could think of, I stopped taking the magnesium, vitamin D and multi-vitamins. I didn’t even think about it. The magnesium returned within the week. You don’t want to know the details. And since the days are getting shorter, I put the vitamin D back in. Because superstition. Haven’t noticed not taking the mutli-vitamins.

I read Brian Sewell’s Outsider II, the second volume of his autobiography; Terence Popp’s The Warrior’s Way and the Soldier’s Soul; Peter Robb’s A Death In Brazil; Media Lens’ Propaganda Blitz; tried Schonberg’s Harmonielehre and gave up; Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things; finished William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and also the Burkholder / Grout / Palisca History of Western Music.

(1,000+ pages of serious reading - with musical notation)

My sight-reading has always been a little flakey, and one exercise I did with the History of Music was to read all the notes aloud in the examples they gave. It was hard work at the start - I had a real slippery spot with D-E-F at the bottom of the stave for a good few hundred pages - but it was worth it. Treble Clef only, of course. I’m not a Real Musician. (Real Musicians can sight read through all the changes of clef at the end of the prelude of Bach’s sixth cello suite, the one for a five-string cello.)

I saw Automatic at Sea, Cotton Pickin’ Chickenpickers, Landscape In The Mist, The Rover, all via MUBI, and all of S8 of House.

Sis and I had supper in Hammer and Tongs on Farringdon Road, which was pretty good, better than the frankly ordinary supper we had at the end of the month (timing) at Rules.

When I went back after the break, I went straight back to having a working-from-home Friday. The five-day-a-week commute thing was okay, but it makes the weekends feel very short and man-I-am-tired-at-the-end-of-it. (You have not heard the last of this.)