Part Timer

So, another working week draws to a close.  This one has been less tiring physically, but not easy emotionally, and I learn to find another way.

This week has been out of kilter; I missed out Monday but came up smiling on Tuesday, in time for my first day on front of house at the Cathedral Restaurant.  Monday's timetable was slightly different, being used primarily as recovery from putting a rather large amount of alcohol inside myself in a short space of time.  The City Inn, a fine establishment in Truro will, for a price, serve ale from the tap in two pint glass Steins.  In the equation of Pebblez plus Steins multiplied by Doom Bar, we know that the only answer is Inebriation.

On Tuesday, the Boy left.  Yes, Barrett my one time nemesis to full time sidekick finally left the building, to depart on his summer of European travel.  God bless and God speed.  We had an emotional and public goodbye in the Restaurant, as thankfully (for him at least) he arrived before the busy time kicks off.  I miss him a lot, actually.  For all the mess that was made, all the arguing about budgets, however much I wanted to wipe him off the face of the Earth when he told me what to do... I do miss him a hell of a lot.  He'll be back!  I mean, he promises to return for a week over Old Choristers' (whether he will stay for that long is another question), and the Good Old Days can return.  Right?

The rest of the Scholars have been peeling off in their own time.  Our Organ Scholar left on Wednesday morning, Mr. McCusker went last night...which only leaves Mr. Lock to go on Sunday.  After that, it's just me and the Beeves...until September.  Now, the living arrangements still as I type aren't completely secure.  At some point, a minor redecorative event is supposed to be happening in the Scholary, which we're supposed to be absent for.  I think it might be a case of seeing what happens when we get there, and not having any clue beforehand.  Best not say any more before I get myself into trouble either.

Currently though my part time working arrangement is going well.  If anything, I could do with more hours to get out of that overdraft quicker, but if I keep to my new budget regime I should be okay... just about.  My plan to install a double bed into my room will have to not touch my Bank account at all, or it'll never happen, as will neither my proposed holiday plan...which hasn;t been discussed properly yet anyway.  That's another big maybe that's a long way off, but if I prepare for it now I can make it seriously easier.  I'll probably have to keep a little brown paper bag under my matress or something for the bed fund (stay the hell away from my matress you hear.)  What I could really do with is an infallible get rich quick scheme, or a significant pay rise.  Alright already!  So could we all!

I've had to seriously rethink my money though.  I'm exceedingly close to the bottom of my overdraft, and need to make some real progress.  It's...difficult.  I looked at the cost of my phone bills for the last 6 months and almost had a heart attack over the appearance of a charge of some £91 a few months ago... Oy Vey!  I am going to actually have to be careful this time.  My latest bill is for a fair 52 quid anyway, so I'm only at twice my contract this month, right?  Ouch.  I need to be careful now, because unlike for the last however many years now there won;t be a Student loan to pick me up in September.  There is no termly cash drop to keep me from trouble.  I have to work now in order to afford to eat, basically!  If I even dared another night out between now and pay day I'll be doomed!  Now my back's up against the wall I am going to have to turn this one right around...which I should have been doing for ages now but I am after all, a fool.

This is the real character building excercise though, I can't run away now.  I've got people to make proud of me again, people who want to see me thrive and succeed, and I can't let them down!  I'll always have myself, let down or not...

...But in fact, that attitude is part of my problem.  Allow me to explain.

My Girlfriend has gone to Italy for a week with her Wind Band.  Well, I say a week.  It's more like 4 days there and the rest travelling.  I am missing her so much right now, it's awful.  It's made worse by the fact that so many people are leaving Truro at the moment anyway, I could do with her being a little closer at least, but I can't win all the time.  I know she's coming back, and the birthday surprises I have in store have been well-planned.  

Whenever I've taken trips away from girlfriends (or vice versa) I've always gone slightly mad, and got a bit needy.  The problem is not that I don't believe that they won't want me still, just that I tell myself that they will see something better than me if I am away, and I'll lose out.  Again.  I tell myself that I'm just not good enough.  I worry and I waste away and I pine and whimper and it's just not very good at all, really.  I've done it for years as well, I hardly know any better.

I am turning this around.  It's very hard.  

I know, heart and soul and strength that there's nobody out there who feels the way I do about her.  Imperfect and crippled I may be, but I'm a Bright, and I always do my best and I never give up.  That's what I am.  Who I am, on the other hand, I am remembering very slowly, and it's down to her that I am, with the right amount of tender support and affectionate chastisement that I need to know I'm doing well.  I haven't given up before, I don't intend to start doing so now.  I know that one day, we'll be very far apart, maybe through accident of employment or education, but it won't matter.  It'll still be us two, together.  I know this.  I almost believe it.  Trust me, I'm trying and God does love a tryer.

Onwards though!  I have a new budget plan, and a job that pays.  Living through this summer won't be cushy, but it'll be a life that I'll have earned the funds for by myself, and that's something to be proud of.  I've done a budget forecast for the next quarter (!), and if I stick to it I'll have made a net gain of some £1200.  I'll be...comfortable! 

Tales of new Employment

So it's all change again.  I'm not coming back to Derby, and I'm not unemployed!  BOOM.

For the last week, I have been working as the Kitchen Porter at the Cathedral Restaurant.  I seriously and wholeheartedly believe that this is not a job designed for one person; more that it is a sore test for those who do not know what hard work is.  Over this week I have earned some two hundred pounds, and have work lined up for the whole of the summer.  Over the course of the Vac, I'll need to vacate my house for some ten days only but that's about it.

Here are some things that I have learned this week:

! - The Dishwasher truly is my mortal enemy.
" -  The Squares of Ashoni was the best training for plate stacking.
£ - Full trays from tables dumped on the deck are the bane of everything.
$ - The smell of Carrot and Coriander soup makes me want to brech.
% - If you don't ask for a break you'll never get one, regardless of the legality.
^ - Once the cutlery goes through the machine is is literally HOTTER THAN THE SUN.
& - Having a mostly Guinness and Jager based hangover will not help.
? - The sight of the pass closing can cheer the lowest of hearts.

Monday was insane.  Like, actually mental.  I've been burnt less in baptisms of fire already!  (Actually I never truly got burnt, but did scald myself with the ROASTING HOT CUTLERY).  Interestingly enough, as allergic as I am to hard work... I haven't been put off totally.  I always used to (and continue) to say that once I'm done with all this music rubbish, I'll train as a chef.  Where does every one start?  At the Porter's station.  

It's not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but not awful.  There is still a sense of achievement even when all the tables get cleared at once and all the plates ever appear in your immediate vicinity.  I only dropped one plate all week, but sadly also knocked the handle off a teapot.  Sad times.  

Tuesday was just as bad, but I arguably got a bit more help.  On Wednesday I decided that the only way to keep the pot wash room sane was to put away dry stuff myself, which once again considerably sped the process up.  Thursday was slightly marred by the addition of midnight prosecco to celebrate Mr. Barrett's 19th birthday, but still remarkably busy.  The soup was very popular.  Not so much Carrot and Coriander but Carrot and Crack Cocaine.

Friday was definitely the quietest.  I even managed to get a whole 15 minutes off where I conversed with my disasterously hungover housemate and bought lunch from the Co-op, rob dogs that they are.  Anyway, even with a whole quarter of an hour off, I managed to get almost everything finished in time for 4pm!  How exciting!

However.  Working 9:30 til 4 every day has left me drained and somewhat irritable, and in bad shape for evensong.  Granted this won't be a problem from next week onwards, what with this Sunday being the last services of the year, but seeing as these were some pretty hardcore services (Monday Howell's St. Paul's, Tuesday Langlais Messe Solennelle, Wednesday Leighton 2nd Service and Friday Tallis Lamentations), I can;t help but feel like I let the side down a bit by just being so tired.  Granted, I wasn't falling asleep at the end of the Nunc Dimittis like I was when I worked at Truro School, but there we go...

The long Vac stretches out before me.  I have a month of employment ahead of me before I even consider August.  But there will be rest for the wicked at some point, and it's my girlfriend's birthday at the end of this month, which I have been preparing for at least a month now.  I had to make sure everything would work out if I wasn't staying in Cornwall, see, but now I am I have some extra wiggle room, as it were.   All I'm really going to say about her now is that things are so much different than ever, and I don't ever need to panic any more.  Oh.  And she's marvellous.  And short.*  But that's enough for now.  

Now, presumably I'm going to do some laundry or wash up in the kitchen now, I suppose.










*This fact included at her request.

Vignette XXX

Redacted.

Intermission

Having recently read the work of two friends whom I had the great pleasure to meet last year in Halls, I am somewhat concious of once again, slacking off as far as this blog is concerned!  Once more, I am typing off the top of my head at 1am, but this time I'm sober, and this time it won't be about Organs.  Well.  Not entirely.


Therefore, starting with Organs, I have taken up lessons again!  Be in no shadow of a doubt that I am expressly pleased with this, even if my lessons no longer take place on a III/P Neoclassical essay with a balanced tracker...sigh... But they do in fact take place on a very fine instrument, built at the beginning of the Twentieth century, mechanical stop, key and coupling action, with some fine stops inside as well.  The trumpet, while without the French grandeur in the bass does not lose power in the treble, with the swell strings being nothing but sheer delight.  I have gone back to where I left off material wise, with Langlais' Priere and Prelude Modale, Vierne's Bercuese, and selections from Couperin's Messe pour les couvents.  Today on a short crawl with my teacher however, I sightread the Andante Tranquillo from Mendelssohn's A major Organ Sonata, and not terribly badly either.  I pedalled!  Huzzah!  My next lesson is on Thursday morning, and it's bloody brilliant to be back.

But my teacher?  Well, he follows on from last year's tradtion, of being a highly skilled and musical man, an excellent improviser, in his mid-twenties... but he's getting married?  Certianly not something Saint J of N would be considering?  Perhaps not...
But I will be attending this wedding at the beginning of June, sat way up at the front of the nave of Truro Cathedral, not only watching the ceremony unfold in front of me (rather than being at the stall!), but also, it transpires, participating!  I haven't read in Church since...well, Mancroft, and certainly not at anything as felicitous as a wedding!  I have  new paisley tie at the ready, and it's just shy of three weeks away.  

The squalid Scholary still stands though, despite all we who live therein.  The kitchen needs breaking again, with a rather unsavoury backlog of plates and pans... not withstanding the hob.  As I am still unemployed, I pick the slack up in the day (or plan to, anyway), so at least the plates and cutlery are clean and ready to go.  As ever, the cutlery box is here, but has been plundered entirely of forks!  I plan to reclaim all mine, and see how that leaves us off for cutlery and flatware.  It's a mystery what happens to forks at the best of times.


There are many half finished drafts on my books here.  Some barely started and abandoned as bad concept, and a few complete essays that cannot be published for various reasons.  There are some that have been written in the first flush of anger for instance, that the cooling influence of a computer that sometimes crashes halfway through have saved from public viewing.  I really ought to do something more interesting with my life than wash up, practice, and generally slulk about on the internet.  I haven't even played any ridiculous videogames for a while now!  Life has slowed down somewhat from the whirlpool that almost dragged me under last term...and I am thankful for that.  It's certainly no quieter.  Different.

Anyway.  There'll be some more beardy organ bearding published soon.  Next week I'll be recording a CD of the music of Philip Stopford with Choir, the weekend after that will be the wedding...and after THAT (with a few days rest), I'll be back in Norwich, A FINE CITY.  Upon my return we perform an Orchestral Eucharist in the Cathedral, and then it's into the last part of Trinity, and the end of the year.  A tearful valediction looms at the beginning of July...

Anyway.  Time for bed.  I have a kitchen to clear and preludes to practice and chess games to win.  See you on the other side.

Reconstruction of a Madman

You know, so much has been going on recently that I managed to forget that I've kept this blog active, albiet with several breaks, for two years now!  Happy birthday.  Or whatever.

Things have been really tough recently though, which is why there hasn't been much publicised activity.  I lost my job, my relationship broke down... actually that's kind of it. but in all seriousness when those two things happen within weeks of themselves, you can't help but get battered down.  

Like before, I'm not here to talk about the hows and wherefores of what happened with my relationship.  It isn't right to air it over the net like this, I won't be bothering.  Thing is that things changed, and that's how things have to be.  I'm still in an emotionally unstable state, I'm not going to lie, but I'm doing all that I can to remain balanced, especially in public.  In all honesty though, I loved her with my whole heart, and did everything I could.  I'm so pleased and proud of what we had, so many good things came of it.  While I might be desperately upset, I'll never forget that, ever.  I know that past the pain lies time for cherishing, and so many memories.  

Okay, enough already.



And what about this job then?  I've been in all but full time employment as the Music Administrator (read as Departmental Undersecretary) at Truro School, a private day and boarding school some 800 pupils strong.  It's been far from easy.  Upon starting, I fell to a particularly nasty depressive episode, because unsurprisingly, the incredible gear change from being unemployed for basically your entire life to a full time (8:30am til 4pm, 5 days a week) job is a killer.  There's no middle ground, and BAM you're on all day every day.  Having to learn how to fit in with the system, meeting new and unfamiliar people every single day.  At least I get to wear a suit just like the good old days, right?  Right.  My core tasks involved sitting behind a desk all day, making photocopies, answering the telephone and generally doing as the Head of Department told me to...except on the odd occasion that I said "No".  Let's recount my favourite episode...


Head of Department - "I want you to get all the kids' choir folders, and make sure that every single one of them has each piece of music."


Me - 'No.'


HoD - "What?"


Me - 'Half of them don't turn up anyway, why not leave it to the kids to be responsible for their own music, because then all the people who actually attend will have the right music, and then those who don't come won't have a folder, so there won't be any wasted copies.'




That little exchange went down like a lead balloon.  Anyway.  I started working there in January, on the 5th, literally the day after I got back to Cornwall.  I basically treated myself like I was invincible, not immortal (as of course I am), and fell foul of it.  The strain was immense.  Things leveled out though, and I carried on.  I was an agent of varying success; while things would have gone much worse without me (as a quick fix stand in), everything that could go wrong on my watch did.  Basically!  I was asked by the HoD to seriously consider my job, and if I wanted to continue in employment there over the half term.  I did, and thought (at the time) that I would merrily wish to continue into the summer term, or Trinity as I still know it. Things were moved in powers above my head, however, that confirmed my empolyment would end once my temporary contract had come to a close, on the 30th of March.  The decision had been made by the 9th, and official correspondance signed, which was not posted until the 14th, let alone received until the 16th of the very same month.  An annoyance, but nothing more; the contract stated that I could be given a week's notice, so a fortnight was no problem really...Okay, I was less than pleased to have discovered it especially after the long schlep down the hill from School to the Scholary, but that's how it goes.


Another milestone from my time at Truro School was my playing of the Chapel Organ in a concert, called Organ and the Word.  I opened with the could-have-been-smoother Croft D major Voluntary, and absolutely oafed it out the park with selections from the Couperin Messe pour les Couvents, witch went down like a storm.  YES THE INEGALITE!  The Chapel organ is the ex-Jesus College Cambridge Instrument, originally built by Mander, and therefore christened in the same way as my excellent friend Mr. Harry Macey would, as the Mandermonium (a name that went down like a storm again...har har), and was built in 1971, an early Neo-Classical instrument.  

Now, I would obviously have much preferred an instrument from 1791...but my experience with the Neo-Classical aesthetic drew me, yea like a moth to a flame.  While it may be scaled down immensely from the mighty Collins (which I do miss very much), having a chorus up to a IV Fourniture on the Great was pleasing once again.  There was even a tierce for my characteristic Dutch warmth... Although I never took the Pachelbel G minor Fantasia to play sadly!  The Collins registrations inside my Pachelbel book reveal an eclectic reed building, with a HW of Trompette 8', Oktave 4', Quint 2 2/3', Superoktave 2' and Tierce 1 3/5', with a RP of Dulzian 16', Gedact 8' and Principal 4' coupled up.  Gritty, reedy, earthy and downright nasty, especially in that E flat minor moment, flavoured by the Valotti temperament.  Delicious!  


However.  Now is a time for looking forward.  This may prove more difficult in some circumstances than others, but there's time.  Time is what we all need every now and again.  I need some time to reassess.  I need a job, yes, but a 9-5 desk job is somewhat outside of my power.  I felt stretched to my absolute limits.  The number of days where I didn't want to get out of bed aren't worth talking about, so I shan't bother.  I do need money coming in, to fuel the lifestyle I have become acquianted with, to fund travel hither and yon, and to keep getting past this overdraft.  Originally, the first letter of the title of this post was a 'D', but I figured that it was better to look forward instead.  While I might be cut up right now, I know deep down that I am in a position of many opportunities: emotionally, professionally and financially.


I will never give up, and that maxim reflects on everything - I will certainly never stop trying to improve myself in every way shape and form available.


Watch this space, because with the increased amount of free time I have now I shall certainly be finding time and place to write some more.  I have several drafts to finish (or actually start afresh...), and Lord knows I've got a lot to say.  I'm just so outspoken.

Vignette XXVIX

Who remembers when I said this?

'Let it be said, "The Quality of Mercy is not Strained".  Once it becomes a strain, what is it?  Ruined?  Or maybe a necessary evil, in and of itself.  What truth is in mercy, what mercy in truth?'

I'm thinking of getting that maxim inscribed upon me.  No, not on my jaw like where I learned it from.  But anyway.  On with the show.  It's almost as if history is repeating itself.  

I'm...recovering from the unexpected and compeltely shattering end to my relationship.   While I saw the signs that it might be ending, I never really thought for a second that it would really happen.  I saw a rough patch as just a bit of a bump in the road, not as a prelude to valediction.  I'm broken and shattered.  Now isn't really the time or place to talk about it.  Another expression I've heard for a long time was "Go to bed with a writer, wake up with shit written about you", and I'm not about to perpetrate that.  It'd be petty, for starters.

But still, everything is so strained.   I feel neither mercy nor closure.  I am weak from heartache, from lack of sleep, from lack of food.  From just the sheer lack of everything.

I wish I could do something.  I wish there was something that I could do that mattered.  That could help.  That could even repair damage.  Some wounds may never heal though.   And I'll always feel the same.

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice. 

Vignette XXVIII

I'm adrift.  

I can't tell what the tide will do.  

The waves will surely overtake me?

The method, the meaning, the madness, the maladies, that misfortune is my cousin...

...That in the end, bitterness kills.

The rest?  Is that it?  Is this the course that lies ahead?

If the rest is silence, then now  c r a c k s  a noble heart.







What wrong have I done to you?  What good have I not done for you?  Listen to me.