Musical Interlude: Mischa Maisky - Haydn Cello Concerto No.1 in C Major

Mischa Maisky performs one of my favourite pieces - Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major.

Here is the final movement.

There is no more World Cup football until the first quarter-finals on Friday.

Music is the best antidote I know for WCWS* and 'football fatigue'.


*(World Cup Withdrawal Syndrome)

Football friends (and Polytunnel Book Club Selection)

Tonight England  play Colombia.

These two friends will be 'watching' the match in a bar in Colombia.
They know that football can unite people and bring them great joy.
It's something to think about.


And now, for your enlightenment and amusement, here's a Russian proverb from the communist era:

                                      We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.

I discovered this pearl of communist wisdom in a paperback travel book titled 'One Steppe Beyond - Across Russia in a VW Camper' by Thom Wheeler. I'm planning to read the tale of the 'classic caper' over the next couple of weeks, as time permits. 

There's a useful map, a double page showing the route from Tallin to Vladivostok, which coincidentally  passes through some of the more famous World Cup venues: St. Petersburg, Moscow and the wonderfully named Nizhny Novgorod! This madcap journey was undertaken in 1997 when the world, and Russia was a different place than it is today.  

You can find out more at www.summersdale.com  by clicking on Thom Wheeler's name in the list headed 'Authors'.

'This engaging tale will be an inspiration for anyone who's ever daydreamed about abandoning the humdrum and hitting the road' says John Mole, author of 'I Was a Potato Oligarch' on the back cover. 

As a certified* daydreamer myself I'm very much looking froward to reading it. 

______________
*On practically every school report of mine they would write: He is always daydreaming in class!

QED - therefore I qualify. 

ps- I'm not sure who is in charge of the newly formed Polytunnel Book Club. I think it must be Dave, but it could be Rachel. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's nobody. I suspect it's not a must to have a polytunnel such as Dave has, just a dry place to sit out of the rain and read whatever takes your fancy. Maybe the Dirty Irish Joke Book or the Uncollected Works of Shakespeare, or even a National Geographic.  I think it all began when I likened Adam Lang, a character in a thriller - The Ghost - to the British politician commonly known as Bush's poodle or marionette on Rachel's blog. The fine summer won't last forever. The rains will come one fine day and should your hard-worked garden or vegetable plot slowly turn into a muddy morass before your very eyes do not despair . . .  a good read will do very nicely. 

I've started a list. All Polytunnel Book Club fans may suggest additions to it via Comments or they may promulgate this list, or their own list, on their own blogs and thereto add their own recommendations and suggestions. When I've read the ones on the list below they will turn red. And a suitable rating will appear (as a % here). Others taking up the challenge on their blogs may want to award stars, emojis, or simply a row of ubiquitous thumbs. The choice, as they say is yours. Now I'm off to cut some brambles.  

'The Ghost' - Robert Harris    78%
'One Steppe Beyond' - Thom Wheeler
'The Potato' - Larry Zuckerman 
'The Leopard' - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Thought for the day

I'm reading the Robert Harris novel The Ghost.

It's about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British Prime Minister of the time, and the renditions.

It's all fiction of course.

But strangely in this morning's Internet Guardian I did read two stories about these events, including one about the 75 rendition flights in Scotland.

And then I remembered there was an airport terrorist attack in Glasgow one time.  I seem to recall it involved a car driven by a doctor crashing into a concrete barricade and bursting into flames outside the main building. I could never understand why somebody would make such an idiotic attack that was always doomed to failure. But it now looks to me as if the driver knew that rendition flights were using the airport and wanted to stage some form of protest.

Of course, since I'm not in possession of any facts, other than the two Guardian stories, one by Peter Beaumont and the other about the MSP's demanding an investigation, I'm only making an assumption.

In other news the 'Welcome to America' cover of Time Magazine which shows Donald Trump standing in front of a 2 year old child separated from her mother has now been shown to be a deception.

The mother, seen with her child in the original picture, has been erased, and the border guard has been replaced by the president. The child's head has been cynically tilted backwards to gaze into the president's face. The truth is that the child and mother, from Honduras where the father still lives with his several other children, were never separated by the US authorities.

The mother paid the smugglers $6,000 for the journey. The father is employed as a harbour man in Honduras.

The reason I know that 'The Ghost' is fiction is because in real life the ex-British PM is still alive.

The reason I know the Time cover which has now been seen all over the world can be nothing more than a bad joke and part of the anti-Trump campaign, is because the true story with original photographs was reported in German in the weekend supplement of my local paper.

The more things change the more they remain

insane.


It's not very long ago we had all those fake news so-called chemical attack videos on mainstream news, BBC, cnn,  et al, featuring children being splashed with water, which the children and their parents told Robert Fisk and a handful of other reporters who were doing their job properly was some kind of rebel faction / anti-government / white helmet publicity stunt.