Posts tagged with “Elgar”

November 08

From Matlock; thoughts and the first Elgar performance

Goodness it is lovely here!  I am really enjoying just the feeling of fresh air - no doubt with the excitement of the concert still to come.  There will likely be libations to the Gods of music and choirs afterwards and that should be fun - I allready have plans to delegat my designated driver status away perhaps.  We shall see what I can arrange.  Over at my Chyrping blog you can see about my wifi troubles!  I shall be returning to this blog post after the concert, sobriety permitting and insomnia facilitating.

I am in a hotel lounge now and there is a conversation going on which I should join in - I shall publish and go and hope I can get some pics tomorrow (Google Arkwright mills and Matlock if you like for images).  Actually i should have mentioned Alison Arkwright because we are staying in Alison House and it is superb!  So beautiful here, like a complete rejujination for the senses.  The venue for our singing was NOT inspiring, but apparently anywhere other than the school gym hall local to the area would have meant we could not fit the orchestra in!  There was one awful moment in the concert when I left a dangling ESSss on a phrase and it was quiet and I am SURE someone MUST have heard me mess up... My current fear is that Stefan Reid will have noticed and mention it at rehearsal on Monday!

05:39 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: , , ,
October 07

Is it a blog without words?

No, I think not.  I think then it turns into a [[tumblelog]] or a [[stumbleupon]] or something.  So despite the late hour I shall pen a few words.  Today I think, fingers crossed, I have got the blogroll sorted, after more hours than I care to mention tinkering with the php.  It was a simple change, but took me an age.  Anyway, now I can order my blogroll as I choose and hopefully that will be the last we hear on the matter.  I seems to have my personal email is available to me again… But I seem to have to use Thunderbird to access it.  Which is no bad thing. It is a mystery what caused the blip, but I suspect the DNS changes which gave my blog quite a blip too.

Below you will see there has been a bit of a media explosion.  I got my mobile lead and a webcam back, so was able to upload the pics I mentioned from the carnival and capture my awful [Wordia] candidate entry for the word didactic.  The site seems to have some sort of problems, so the upload is not happening, but  it is there on YouTube and maybe it will get to Wordia someday, if they answer my question.

I've also spent a little time on my [[NaNoWriMo]] account and that's on the sidebar now too.  The aim is that I am going to write a novel in November.  I had an idea today, the only one so far for the writing.  It is just the germ of an idea at the moment.  I'm not sure if it will bear fruit.  My hope is that I could make a plot device or take some liberties with the literary form to intertwine a blog as a narrative device within a novel. As you may guess the idea is to make that blog actually be this one!  This would be a neat trick as it would mean I can continue to blog whilst working on the novel, and all the words here would also count towards the 50,000 required for NaNoWriMo.  It may make for an unusual blog archive for the month of November, we'll have to see how I can develope the idea.

Incidentally there's a spin off from NaNoWriMo calle NaBloPoMo... I'm still not sure about that one.  Perhaps I shall add it to the sidebar and participate.  It would be easy to do so during November, which is also their main month.  They just want a blog post every day for a month.  During the current month there is a theme and you are invited to blog on the subject of "voting".  I took the view this was a very American take on things and I would not like to be restricted in my blogging scope that way for a month.  But during November I gather there is no thematic requirement, so I may be up for that.

One of the reasons it is so late as to make this post dated the 7th is that  I had choir practice this evening.  I have added a brief excerpt from the piece, though this does not include the choral parts I have to sing it is quite beautiful.  If you'd like to hear the full recording it is available at the moment from a subsidiary page which you could hunt out via the ABOUT ME links, but I keep the audio on the blog shorter than the 130MB download the complete concert takes!

That's about it; a busy day all round.

01:01 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: , , ,
September 22

So, here I am, maybe....

This posted despite;

Fatal error: Call to a member function title() on a non-object in /home/wrighton/public_html/didactic.me/chyrp_2.0rc1/includes/helpers.php on line 656

So it seems I have (maybe?!) set up the necessaries to blog. I always feel like writing "Trent settled nervously into his seat..." at moments like this, but I am not sure many people will necessarily "get" the reference, nor am I prepared just yet to go off hunting out the relevant Youtube clip assuming it can even be found.

I hope my blog will hit moments of being truly interesting or entertaining, but as to whether any entry is likely to be truly Didactic I have my doubts. So the domain name I purchased was largely tongue in cheek - I spent several days mulling over what might make sense for a Blog domain name, and when I saw this was free I sort of jumped on it. No doubt that says something about me, but what I am not sure. I suspect a more suitable name could have been "eclectic.me", but it does not have the same ring to it for me and would implie my blog could shoot off in any direction without any unifying theme or purpose.

After purchasing the domain name I was, of course, committed. Money had changed hands. Not exactly Faustian, but it was enough to spur me onwards to enquire with my good friends over at OSNN and rapidly narrow down the choice of tools to either Wordpress or Chyrp!. I decided to go with Chyrp on a particular recommendation, because it was younger, because it aims to be lighter and more nimble, and because so far it seems to do just what it says on the tin!

I'll later work around sorting out how I add blogrolling and links and when I do I shall have to revisit my "home" domain and update the "about me" sort of information. But if anyone does just wander across me here in cyberspace be patient and you should see this blog become more "worthy" with the passage of time and growth of my networking.

Perhaps one of my first trackbacks or whatever will be the one I have added here - a friend I am hoping to meet for the first time on Wednesday for lunch to chew the cud and no doubt blogging will be a large part of what we chat about. Just learnt this is not a trackback - have to work harder...

Other things you may hear about soon are:-

My participation in a possible "human piano" on BBC2.

rehearsals of/performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (I sing first bass with a choral society).

And last but not least the upcoming "NaNoWriMo" in November. This was a driving motivation in the background for me to start blogging - I wanted to loosen up my "literary voice" and get comfortable here so that I can blog my progress and revert to bouncing ideas around should I suffer any temporary blockage in the process of attempting to splurge out a novel in a month. Of course, if all goes terribly well that could also mean you simply see no Blog entries for November because all my keystrokes are devoted to the effort.

Anyway, let's see how it goes.

Whether I know you or not, all comments are welcome and for the moment only Spam will be filtered out and deleted (more on that subject to follow also!).

09:57 PM | 1 Comment | Tags: , ,