The Green Belt

I’ve been very dormant for the last couple of days, but for a quiz in a golf club in the Green Belt around South Mimms last night. It’s always a bit odd to be in the Green Belt. It can be really very rural in those parts and yet you’re never far from a city view or that curious orange halogen glow which hangs from the clouds in London. I drove home with thick mists swirling around the car.

Lesley, who I was assisting, is the big boss of the company. I like and respect her enormously. QuizQuizQuiz is a large and successful operation which she’s built up from scratch. For one of the questions she played Wuthering Heights backwards and then astonished me by singing along to it, with every backward inflection observed perfectly! She also introduced me to The Shepherd Tone, which is a curious spiralling phenomenon in music where a descending chromatic run appears to get higher and higher or lower and lower without actually moving more than an octave in pitch. It’s all to do with the use of octaves and the volume at which the notes are being played at. I guess it’s the musical equivalent of a möbius cowl!

It snowed in Highgate all day today but the snow had turned to horrible, cold rain by the end of the night. I understand it’s been snowing fairly heavily elsewhere in the UK. But I want it to settle!