The Day After the Night Before
First a few leftovers from last night.*
First: cutest birthday present.** 
The music stand is obviously
more crucial to my development as an artist*** but a girl also needs cute.
Second: Dog Sculpture. You cannot, even if you look at it in close up, see how very peculiar Chaos’ posture is in the first photo of all of us on the sofa. This is his what I call Dog Sculpture because of the way he glues his head to his shoulder, like those graceful but anatomically incorrect sculptures of curled-up creatures made out of natural materials like a lump of rock or a piece of tree, when the sculptor is paying attention to the grain of the original. Alternatively hellhound as large netsuke. It doesn’t look the least bit comfortable but he will nap off like this. This photo doesn’t do justice to the pretzel he can bend himself into if he’s in the mood. But it does show off the elegance of his neck nicely.
Third: to put to rest speculation on the subject of the tie Peter was wearing last night: 
Jousting knights. Yup. And the waistcoat is red, black and gold and doesn’t go at all. He should have been wearing his unicorn tie with that waistcoat. Hmm. Possible future lo-text Monday: a Tour of Peter’s Ties. He’s also got a dragon one. And a kangaroo one. As a native of the northern hemisphere I find kangaroos every bit as mythic as dragons and unicorns.
* * *
I got to my voice lesson late today. Trauma. They’re resurfacing the drive at the mews and I managed to half-forget that I had to walk back to the cottage to pick up the car. So I spilled across Blondel’s threshold gasping which is not a good beginning. I then squarely put my foot on my own neck† by saying that I was taking the week off from work and that this therefore would be a good time to give me something new to learn. Whereupon Blondel wandered thoughtfully around his studio with his brow furrowed with concentration and eventually produced Gerald Finzi’s Let Garlands Bring, five Shakespeare songs for voice and piano, which he opened with a flourish to ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ which has a really pretty tune†† and a killer-in-a-good-way last page which is like Gregorian chant only not really, however is one of these killer-in-a-bad-way situations where you and the piano have very frelling little to do with one another, except in a kind of exciting adversarial stand-off with the piano trying to scare you to death. It was all right today with Blondel singing with me, but it’s going to be interesting next week when he’ll be expecting me to do it alone.
Then I bludgeoned poor old Gluck some more. It makes me nuts that I can, at this point, with some degree of regularity, hit that not-a-big-ungleblarging-deal-get-a-grip-McKinley F at the end, at home. Singing it for Blondel . . . not only does it come at the end, it’s important, you know? You don’t just slip up to it, give it a tap on the shoulder and slip away again, it’s your moment. No! No! I don’t want any moments! I want to hide behind a curtain and let someone else have moments! So as I’m singing the rest of it I know it’s coming and by the time I get there . . . eeep. It’s like the other week when I’d warmed up pretty well at home and went in there ready to sing . . . and by the time Blondel had got to the end of the second line of the intro to He Was Despised I’d completely shut down and came in on a fractured squeak. AAAAAAAUGH.
I also told him that I thought I was practising wrong, and did he have any advice, and he said what did I mean, wrong? And I said that I felt as if I came home every week and instantly forgot everything he’d told me and reverted to establishing all my bad habits further. And he said, what bad habits? And I said, well, breathing, and support, and voice placement—and I think I may have done a small rant here about the mystery and unreliability of the human body, to wit, mine. And he said, the fact that you’re aware of all this suggests to me that this is not what’s happening. And, he said, your breath control and sound quality have improved a lot.
Oh.
Actually, he’s right.††† But I would like to stop with the fractured squeaking thing.
* * *
* I wish. The foie gras^ was to die for and the scallops were . . . divine, to develop a theme. Peter had scallops for starters and went on to duck breast. He said the duck was also spectacular but I feel I won by having more scallops than he did.
^ I am a foie gras fiend. Relatively speaking. We go out to dinner at a serious restaurant maybe twice a year+ and if there’s foie gras on the menu, I eat it. It could probably be said that restaurants we develop anything like a habit of returning to have foie gras on the menu.++
+ When PEGASUS is on the best seller list for 943 weeks we’ll go out more often. Well, maybe. Even foie gras probably isn’t worth only eating anything at all once a week as a regular thing.~ You want major calories? Foie gras. You can feel your waistband getting tighter before the fork reaches your mouth.
~ Get away from me with that lettuce leaf. Don’t you realise it has at least .05 calories?
++ Please don’t all rush to the forum to post how much you hate foie gras, okay? I know it’s not everyone’s idea of joy. Occasionally this works out to my advantage. I once had an extremely fancy publishing lunch with Hannah—she paid: she was celebrating some terrifying business thing or other, I forget what—where they just brought you a tiny pre-starter starter: foie gras.~ Hannah didn’t want hers. That moment alone almost balanced thirty years of friendship.~~
~ Very fancy lunch. As I say.
~~ Not quite.#
# Yes. Hannah reads this blog.
** From Peter. He had a little help choosing. Even so.
*** COUGH COUGH COUGH SNARK SNARK
† Speaking of contortionist postures
†† Genuine earnest serious committed voice students I’m sure don’t say tune
††† You still do not want to hear me sing. We’re in ‘that only a voice teacher could love’ territory.
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