Blondel
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! BLONDEL HAS APPLIED FOR A JOB IN CANTERBURY/YORK/WESTMINSTER/THE OTHER FRELLING SIDE OF THE FRELLING WORLD! HIS WIFE AND I BOTH HOPE HE DOESN’T GET IT! *
The shock was apparently good for me in the immediate present however**. I actually produced one or two notes that were not totally embarrassing, which is nearly a first.*** Of course Blondel’s exercises merely get sillier: to assist me in not collapsing he had me doing that pigtails-and-dirndls thing of making connected loops out of your two thumbs touching your two forefingers. You then hold your linked hands down at lower belly level where your support is, and your elbows out to the sides† and you’re so busy feeling like a twit it stiffens your spine wonderfully.†† I was expecting this week’s lesson to be as discouraging as last because I haven’t had enough time to practise but apparently this was one of those weeks where Secret Invisible Physical Things are happening. One of you real singers out there posted to the forum some months ago something to the effect that pretty well every human being has enough voice that with training it can be made worth listening to††† and that you doubted that I was one of the exceptions to this rule. You may be right after all.‡
I was so disturbed by the possibility of losing Blondel however that I rushed to the local farm store‡‡ and bought large bags of compost, fertilizer, perlite, grit and gravel‡‡‡ etc. Which at least gave me the excuse FINALLY TO GET OUT INTO THE GARDEN IN THIS BEAUTIFUL WEATHER WE’VE BEEN HAVING SINCE SATURDAY. And which is due to go away again . . . tomorrow. I guess I’ll just have to stay indoors and practise my Purcell and my Finzi.§ I am also suffering a faint teasing notion about a song for a bass-baritone. If I write him songs, do you suppose Blondel will stay?§§
* * *
* He’s already made it through the first round and has been called back for a second interview. Intersing. Whatever. Maybe he could have a nice little six-hour attack of laryngitis? Hit the first flat note of his entire career? Maybe he could decide he doesn’t want to live in a cathedral/minster/abbey close where the mean density of tourists is approximately forty-nine per square foot in high summer? This last is a consideration, he says, because the vicars choral^ or whatever his title would be there, live in the close, which is madly Elizabethan or Jacobean or something and a total foreign-geek-with-loud-voice-and-camera magnet and, he further says, there were already too many tourists milling around when he went up for his intersing and it’s only March. Yes. New Arcadia^^ is only a small Hampshire village stuck out in the middle of a lot of farmland but even we have tourists, and way too many of them stroll up my cul de sac because this is the oldest part of the town and we’re so obviously quaint.^^^ Come a little nearer and I’ll give you quaint with my large pointy garden fork. And closes are a trifle claustrophobic by definition. Peter’s younger brother was dean of Salisbury+ which has a very famous—and very beautiful—close, but visiting them gave me palpitations: you had to knock the trippers out of the way with a stick, even in November or February. Although front row seats for the Three Choirs Festival++ went some distance toward mollifying me, I wouldn’t want to live there. Where Blondel is now is a nice little back terrace on the edge of Mauncester where he can pretend to be a banker or a barkeep or a bouncer or anything he likes when he’s off duty. They wouldn’t have a garden in the close. I’m counting on his wife’s floral ambitions.
I need a nice elderly voice teacher who is just sort of keeping his/her hand in taking the occasional absurdly talent-free student who will never need him to compose a letter of recommendation to the Royal College of Music, and whose highest aspiration is winning the Biggest Pumpkin/Dahlia/Sheep Contest at the local fete, instead of one of these damned young ambitious creatures.
^ I’ve just been checking what google is going to tell you about this and there’s kind of a variety. What Blondel is however is the professional adult singer type of vicar choral, aka lay clerk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_clerk I think ‘vicar choral’ sounds much more impressive.
^^ And have I mentioned that New Arcadia is old and Old Eden is new? Thus the British spirit of anarchy and confusion.
^^^ The Big Pink Blot is a little way out of the centre of town and has a long driveway so Peter’s mews is mostly spared the tourist invasion. What the mews does get however is a lot of the Lost, the At Sea and the Miserable. The estate that the Big Pink Blot once held sway over went on quite a distance, and there are lots of Discriminating Developments of barns, mews, labourers’ cottages, dungeons, nymphs’ grottoes etc, and visitors are always turning down the wrong small tasteful unfrellingmarked lane.
+ Yes, I’m afraid so. This makes his title The Very Reverend. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. If you’re a bishop you’re The Right Reverend. Archdeacons are The Venerable, or The Ven. Snork. Sorry. But who needs fantasy when you have the Anglican hierarchy?~
~ Honourable mention to the Orders of the British Empire.
++ Which appears to have been renamed the Southern Cathedrals Festival when I wasn’t looking
** Or maybe it’s the shouting. Due to the stress level of page proofs there has been, possibly, more yelling lately. Husbands, hellhounds, computers^, branches-invisible-in-the-twilight-lashing-one-across-the-face^^, pairs of All Stars which have mysteriously migrated to the middle of the floor^^^, they are all pressed into stress-release service.
^ especially computers
^^ Hope there weren’t any sensitive, impressionable children or frail little old people in earshot
^^^ No, Blondie is safe in her box sitting . . . er . . . next to the piano, mixed up with the sheet music.
*** I’m still aiming for back row of the chorus in some local amateur something some day, just to have done it.^
^ Fantasy? I have lots of those. I think the most reliable is the a cappella early music group. It’s not going to happen, which is fine, I don’t have the time. Just as well I don’t have a voice really.
† I am Maria Von Trapp. I am Julie Andrews. I am a meatloaf.
†† If he’s trying to make me believe that it would be a relief to stop these ridiculous voice lessons IT ISN’T WORKING.
††† In some cases this necessitates burial in the back row of a chorus
‡ But don’t hold your breath about the YouTube debut.
‡‡ Where you can buy most of your basic garden-centre stuff like compost and fertiliser for half to two-thirds of the price of the same stuff at a garden centre.
‡‡‡ As I hoisted the frellers up the steep half-flight of stairs to the garden at the cottage I found myself wondering in a carefully detached sort of way just how many years I’m going to be able to keep doing this. At the moment it’s just a nuisance. But one of the bags of ‘organic farmyard fertilizer’, which is to say sterilised sh*t, had got wet, and out of curiosity I weighed the sucker. 59.8 pounds. Under fifty and I can still heave them around without too much trouble—that last ten pounds is kind of a scoundrel.
§ Dowland next week.
§§ I think this might have the opposite effect. . . .
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