When I was serving as a juror we had to watch some dashcam footage over and over again. It wasn’t upsetting in itself, though it did show the car in question driving at very high speeds; what was upsetting was that we knew what happened after the footage stopped. And it occurred to me that everyone’s life is like dashcam footage; you watch it all and then it cuts off just before the end. And right now my dashcam footage would show a lot of tennis, a fair bit of music (both listening and playing) and of course plenty of writing. Right now I’m learning The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba on piano (it’s actually a keyboard but to me it’s a substitute piano) as well as trying to recall pieces I used to play like Fur Elise, Tubular Bells and a couple of the Preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. I adore Bach; to me he is god. He knows everything and there’s no-one who matches up the intellectual and the emotional like he does: he’s the Shakespeare of music. I get very emotional both listening and playing music; in fact if I’m visiting some church or cathedral and the organist starts playing – especially if it’s something like Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D minor – I’m liable to start rolling around in ecstasies like Sally in the restaurant scene. It’s embarrassing. It’s not only classical of course; Jon Anderson can always lift the roof off my head and Cohen regularly breaks my heart. I like people with great voices, like Rufus Wainright and Joni Mitchell, though after a million cigarettes she can’t hit the high notes like she used to. I’m generally an Old Fart when it comes to pop as I think there’s an awful lot of pap (not to mention rap, which I can’t stand*) around nowadays. But I like Elbow, especially ‘One Day Like This’ and – erm, there’s a couple of other things I like but I can’t remember what they are. Perhaps they’ll come to me.
* The thing about rap is that, while I think it’s clever and inventive, I just can’t stand it. I have the same reaction to opera.
As far as the tennis goes there have been some absolutely blinding matches. You think you’ve seen some good players and then you watch Djokovic and you realise you’re in a whole different league. Even so, his match against Rublev was a real tussle. I look forward to seeing him in the semis today. On the women’s side too there have been great matches and I’ve been watching Ons Jabeur, the brilliant and characterful Tunisian player, with interest. They also give great coverage to the doubles, and though all Brits are out in the singles there are still one or two sprinkled around in the mixed doubles and wheelchair tournament. This, once you get used to the change of pace, is also well worth watching, so I basically have to stop myself from spending the entire day in front of BBC iplayer.
So that’s my dashcam footage up to date. Hope I’m not about to have some kind of disaster…
Kirk out