Gloom
I have (mild) stomach flu. (I think it’s stomach flu.)
I definitely have ME. In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.* Glurb. Unggh.** It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.
And Blondel has left forever. Well, Thursday. He’s leaving forever. On Thursday. His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape. And his mum. I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything. Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises. But today was THE LAST. LAST, LAST, LAST.
Waaaaaaaaah.
There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions. In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.† In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house. The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway. The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing. AAAAAAAUGH. Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home. Where is he going to be teaching?†† One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms? (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.) AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††
Blondel did sing for me today: some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet). I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland. I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano. Golly. I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel. I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡ Bryn is a hard act to follow. Blondel can do it. And he’s going away forever.
I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin.
* * *
* I am so old I remember when that song came out.
** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening. Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel. Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster. The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift. And it drools.
Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this: http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg
(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ )
*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet. The cherub is barely into his twenties. And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job. But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old.
† Because I’m a twit. Next question.
†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students. This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke. He probably has student loans to pay off.
††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus. But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is. I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option. I don’t have those much any more. It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel: only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.
‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’
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