Gullible romantics

We went to the quiz at the Curtain’s Up last night and came second by one point. A very badly worded question about Buckingham Palace did for us good and proper. Sometimes, having just that little bit too much knowledge about a subject means you get the answer wrong!


Today has been all about the motet. I was up early, dealing with a large number of emails from people who are interested in performing in it and it’s becoming rather apparent that there are still too few gospel and folk singers asking for more information. On the bright side, we already have a choir of five Magdalene College Cambridge graduates lined up, so that’s a great weight off my mind! I did an interview for an on-line magazine, ate spaghetti on toast and then went to the gym, where amongst other things, I skipped 1000 times, pretending to be a boxer, but probably looking like a little tiny girl!

Somewhere in all that, Philippa telephoned to say she was worried that her semi-feral cat was going to ravage little Deia. The other day it lashed out and scratched her perilously close to the eye, in response to having its tail pulled. Deia is 15 months old, and probably not yet aware that Dandelion the cat isn’t a soft toy, so Philippa is wondering whether she should try to re-house her. The cat, not her daughter. Initially I wondered if she was being a touch over-protective, until she told me that her Mum knew someone who was scarred for life by a childhood incident involving a cat.

We talked about Hilary’s wonderful wedding, laughed at the incident with the bouquet of flowers, and discussed the fact that she’d also been perturbed by the minister’s sermon, feeling that the story about little Ben and the blood transfusion was actually a plot line from an episode of The OC. She also reminded me that before that particular story, the vicar spoke about the importance of a wife being servile and keeping quiet, and that no one could work out if he was being ironic or not. We were probably all too busy taking photographs of the beautiful sunlight to give it much thought!

Not a great deal was going on in Pepys’ life 350 years ago today. The fleet of ships remained anchored just short of Gravesend, whilst messengers from London came aboard to bring news of elections for Parliament and reports that various statues and portraits of King Charles I were being returned to prominent public places. Many had been destroyed by Cromwell, but a fair number had been hidden, some were even buried, and these were slowly re-appearing. There’s even a tale of a smith who bought a bronze statue of King Charles which he was meant to melt down, but made a fortune selling its pieces to Royalists. Imagine everyone’s surprise when, after the Restoration, the statue magically re-appeared, fully intact! I’m sure that 330 years later, many pieces of the Berlin Wall were similarly being sold to gullible romantics!