February 2017 Review

For a month of twenty-eight days, February lasted a long time. Mainly because it was cold. If you asked me, I would have said I did nothing all month except go to work and stay home because it was too cold to go out, or stay out. However, that wouldn’t be true.

I saw the Pina Bausch Masurca Fogo, Eva Yerbabuena’s Apariencias and the Gala Flamenco, all at Sadlers Wells.

I’m not going to attempt to describe these. I sat through all three shows entranced and fascinated, and in the case of the Gala, astonished at the virtuosity and energy of the dancers, and the interplay between the dancers, singers and musicians once the solos have begun, and all the have to guide them is their talent, skill and knowledge of the genre. For a long time now, Flamenco is where you go if you want to see and hear improvisation at its best.

It took me years to get round to seeing Bausch’s work on stage, and there’s nothing like it. As time goes by, it may simply vanish. According to Amazon, there are no DVD’s of her work. Someone should put that right tout de suite, as they say in Wuppertal.

I had a WHOLE MONTH when I didn’t visit the dentist.

I got serious about pull-ups. That required doing close-grip front pull-downs of heavier weight session after session, and in the last week of February, I managed 3x1 narrow-grip pull-ups. I weigh 95 kilos and I’m 63. Call my nephew when you’re doing that at my age. The point isn’t that you can knock out sets of 10 wide-grip pull-ups, so sets of one are a joke to you, it’s that this is the first time in my life I’ve managed a pull-up. The point is change and improvement.

I saw just one film, It’s Only The End of The World at the Curzon Soho, and I got all the way through Elementary S4. I finished the Antoine Doinel’s with L’Amour en Fuite.

I’m working my way very slowly through the 650 pages of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar; finished Michael Negnevitsky’s Artifical Intelligence, A Guide to Intelligent Systems; read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, Gregory Zuckerman’s The Greatest Trade Ever, and Hammond Innes’ The Wreck of the Mary Deare.

I moved into the back bedroom to sleep. I have residual hyper-vigilance, and dripping rain sets it off. The rain drips on the front of the house, not the back. I can sleep right through the central heating boiler firing up, but those water drops wake me right up.

I upgraded the home network, and the car passed its MoT for another year. So not a bad month really, except for the whole too-darn-cold thing.