Digitalized Saturdays

Musical note: I am playing Satie, the first time for ages. Satie requires the perfect performance, the perfect acoustic, the perfect piano. Here he has those things: Reinbert de Leeuw, digitally adapted sound (Deutsche Grammophon + Decca + Philips Classics) and probably a Steinway. Teeee-uuuuuu-oooooo-oo-oo-oo-oo-ned by an angel. Except for one unresonating string struck in track 3. Or am I imagining that . . .. Gorgeous Saturday morning stuff. Track 14 (Gnossiennes No. 1) is one of the themes from ‘Chocolat’.

In my sacred part of London (more later since I am planning to digitally map my district – and indeed it would be wondrous if we could all digitally map our bits of ‘our’ cities) we have large rubbish collection trucks which have extremely loud backing signals. The Saturday men, bless them, must believe in waking us up. They have been know to klaxon for an hour or more. I have seen otherwise sane blokes, awaked early by the din, go up to them, in that stiff- postured way that means they are already white with anger, to remonstrate. Of course the men just go: ‘ealth and safety, gov’ in that way they have. There’s a school round the corner (probably mostly closed since it’s Saturday) so they’re within their rights. The entire district has had to develop sonar (do pay attention at the back, that shd be sonic) ways (see above) to survive this onslaught. Oh, it’s nearly time for lunch.