Back home and a concert

Here we are, back in good old blighty, on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon. It was raining less than an hour ago but now it’s so warm that I’m sitting outside on the garden bench to blog. Yesterday I awoke feeling distinctly out of sorts. I can’t put my finger on it but I was headachy all day. I had a hair appointment in the morning and suffered through it in near silence (having explained to my lovely hairdresser why I was not my usual chatty self). As soon as I got home I took myself to bed for two hours and awoke feeling much better. This left James to pay our cat sitter Tina, and meet with our plumber and tiler, as well as making the dinner. By the way the cats were thrilled to see us come home, and celebrated by fighting each other playfully all around the house, leaving tufts of cat hair everywhere. They also killed a mouse and captured two birds, which James managed to set free.
It was just as well that I recovered, because in the evening we went to see Stravinsky’s The Firebird at the City Halls. We hadn’t looked at our tickets properly so we went to the GRCH first only to find it suspiciously locked up. Luckily we were still in good time so we trotted down the hill to the City Halls where we had excellent seats in the front row of the balcony.
James and I both love Stravinsky’s The Firebird and indeed it was glorious. We also enjoyed the first half of the programme, which comprised George Butterworth’s gentle and poignant “On the Banks of Green Willow” and Vaughn William’s “On Wenlock Edge” which set to music six of of A.E. Housman’s poems. What all three pieces of music have in common is that they were written in the years preceding the First World War, just before the world was about to change so much. In fact Butterworth was killed in August 1916 during the Battle of the Somme and his name is on the Thiepval Memorial, which we visited last weekend.