The Stuff Conundrum

Excess baggage - I have been whimpering vaguely about this here for some time. So it's time to clear out some of it.

I am fanatical about getting rid of stuff. Really. I've got more extreme over the last year or so, ever since a close (very rich) friend moved to a minimalist flat which she had had gutted and rebuilt at enormous expense of money and mental effort, taking her piles of spinster junk with her. We all helped her unpack, and each of us found something that made us tear our hair out: for R, it was the box full of broken kitchen equipment: for A, the box full of empty plastic bags: for J, the carrier bag full of copper coins: for me, the plant pot filled with real earth with plastic flowers stuck in it, looking like something from Poundland (and the Gary Barlow tape that she refused to bin).

Eight months on, she has almost finished unpacking. I think once she's found a home for the shoeboxes full of newpaper cuttings and the files of university notes (we graduated in 1988) then it'll probably be sorted. Except that in this big lovely flat, which was designed to have masses of storage space, she has no room. Every cupboard, every drawer, every shelf is crammed with stuff. The suitcases in the cupboards are full of other bags. The makeup bags that you get with gifts-with-purchase are stuffed full of bottles of lotions and potions.

My reaction to the helping-unpack saga was to come back to my own, far more modest flat, and go through it hunting down extraaneous junk until two in the morning. I had five binbags full of stuff to throw away or give to Oxfam (this is on top of a regular chuck-out session). I realise that in its way that this is just as unhinged as hoarding, but it's incredibly satisfying. It's partly a privacy thing - if I am constantly reviewing what I have, then I am in control of what my possessions say about me. It gives me a (probably illusory) sense of control over my life: it also means that I can usually find things (though the corollary to that is that I get very freaked by not being able to find things). My ex-boyf. used to say in tones of wonder, "I love the way the iron is always in the same place!" as though this were some miracle unattainable by normal human beings. Is it?

I'd better go now. I haven't sorted out my makeup in - ooh, weeks, it must be.

Oom Pa Pa

I've just got back from a week in Devon at a music summer school. It was very scary at first, because:

1. I'd never been before and was sure everyone else would be miles better than me.

2. It was a 220 mile drive from home so I couldn't just scuttle back easily if it was a disaster.

3. I was going on my own and worried that everyone else would take all their mates with them.

In the event, it was brilliant. There were a few iffy moments but the chance to spend most of a week making and listening to music was fantastic. If I'd wanted to (or had the energy) I could have gone to three concerts every day. In the end, I did:

Big Choir - we did the Chichester Psalms and an amazing, obscure piece called Sephardic Passion by a chap called Noam Sheriff. It was commissioned in 1992 by Placido Domingo to mark the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Toledo. There is a long, incredibly difficult mezzo-soprano solo in the middle of it which sounds like gypsy singing - we didn't hear it till the final rehearsal when a tiny Italian woman stood up in the middle of the choir and delivered it - it was stunning - so powerful.

Jewish traditional music course - with a group called the Burning Bush. We learnt folk songs and ballads and sang with the klezmer orchestra. Very disorganised, but great fun and interesting. I am in love with their clarinettist, who is sadly a. 10 years younger than me, and b. already married, with 3 lovely children (they were staying in the same house as me). If you ever get a chance to hear him (Ben Harlan), take it!

Voice workshop - I hated this but it was good for me. I ended up singing for a very classy voice coach, very badly indeed, but it has made me realise I need to find a teacher here in London (which means finding a new job where I don't have to travel, probably).

Jazz - listening to and singing various things, both in concerts and at the place where I was staying, as one of the other people there was a jazz pianist. Mack the Knife is easier with a bottle of wine in you!

Concerts - the Israel piano trio, Rafael Wallfisch, chamber groups.... all in a medieval hall.....


It was one of the most physically beautiful places I've ever been too - a medieval manor with fantastic gardens including a tiltyard. On Friday, there was a full moon, and I took a breather from the Viennese waltzes that were the late evening entertainment, and went and sat in the gardens in the moonlight. Truly stunning.

I've put a link in case after this gushathon anyone wants to know more.

The head stuff that came out of this was that I became profoundly grateful that I was not good enough at music to have the choice to go professional. This was something troubling one of the nicest (and most talented) people I met there - she had been to sing with a choir in the Vatican and had afterwards been approached by a legendary singing teacher who offered to take her as a pupil - this would mean abandoning plans to become a barrister and going off to Rome for at least a year. It may sound perverse, but I am so bad at decisions that I am very glad not to have to make one like that. I love music, and making music in particular, but I am happy for it to stay as a source of pleasure, not revenue.

And another thing.....

Oh yes, and I still intend to write about excess baggage. I am piling up a great quantity of things to say. I should probably take them to Oxfam.

Hounded by Trolls

Things have been strange in a dull kind of way recently. Or maybe dull in a strange kind of way. I went singing in Devon, which was lovely, and to stay with a friend. She has an idyllic house in the deep country, two lovely children, a nice husband.... but this time round I had the honesty to admit to myself that her life would bore me stiff. So that was good. I always thought I wanted children, domesticity, the whole nine yards: I'm not saying I don't, just that if it doesn't happen, it won't be the catastrophe I used to think it was.

Work has been vile. Very busy, but with very little to show for it. I am working for a madman, and with several Norwegians. I had a six and a half hour conference call yesterday, during which at one point the Norwegians started singing a folk song. I am doing my best to think of myself as an unwitting participant in some management consultancy version of Big Brother: certainly, the pointless tasks and the yoking together of mutually antipathetic personalities is a big feature of my weekday life at the moment.

The strange thing is that I am writing a proposal. I have terrible trouble with writing stuff for work - none at all with this sort of stream of consciousness nonsense. I can witter on for hours in an email or on MSN (if your firewall bans it, try WebMessenger by the way - works for me) in a relatively literate and joined-up way. But I cannot write the sort of stuff we are supposed to write in proposals. I have just spent about four hours agonising about some total BALLS about change management: quite ridiculous. I don't care in the slightest about it. What I do care about, I am ashamed to say, is people who I think are less clever than me being able to read what I write and pick holes in it. That's why this sort of writing is OK and the proposal sort isn't. Well, it's part of it, anyway. There's also my sneaking conviction that this sort of writing is actually more worthwhile than going on about leveraging synergies.