Suppressing the weeds

Half-year cruisers like us (correction: like we intend to be) have either the best of both worlds or the worst. Year-round liveaboards take their life with them. Occasional cruisers get home regularly to keep an eye on things. We have this fabulous prospect of exploring all sorts of wonderful places during late spring, summer and autumn. Unfortunately that's just the time when the garden explodes with life, not all of it welcome, but all of it needing to be husbanded (fancy word for dead-heading the roses, mowing the lawn and cutting back the 6 foot length of bramble that came from nowhere last night).

My best-beloved has to shift her exercise-ground from the gym as we prepare to head off, so she's been getting in practice by getting at the weeds. Clearing them is one thing, keeping them away is another, so she's put down some of that sheeting, suitably cut where the roses or other friends come through, and covered it all with chipped bark. Looks great. Today she might just put some heavyweight plastic where the ground elder has invaded.

We really haven't yet worked out how to cope with all the other stuff once we're travelling. But we're certainly not going to sit here worrying about it and going nowhere in consequence. We'll think of something. There's plenty of time in the future to do nothing.

Planning for July

We're getting our minds around having Elissa (8) and Sam (7) over from Norway in July, for a week on Erin Mae. We've ordered some booster seats for the car journey from the airport, and our friend Jon will lend us a couple of life-jackets. Perhaps we should get a couple more for ourselves, in case the kids get boisterous!

The boating itself is bound to provide lots of fun and exercise. But we're also trying to plan a route that will take in a range of additional energy-sapping opportunities, preferably of the sort where the children can burn calories by themselves, while we quietly take on a few in some shady corner near by.

Other boating bloggers report great times with kids on board. So far we've done the grandparenting thing in fairly small doses. I've a feeling we won't know what's hit us when the time comes!

Making Plans

"When are you off on your boat?" Seems like everyone's saying it, as though they can't wait to get rid of us. "Nice boating weather!" (true). "Bet you can't wait to get away!" (also true). "Thought you'd retired" (sort of true).

And then, just when it all seems to be coming together, Carol Kirkwood informs us (smile as bright as ever) that we're in for snow storms and freezing nights, as Mediterranean March moves off into the sunset. So, do we provide Erin Mae with the comforting warmth of our presence, or do we delay just a little longer in the balmy south? Will it be Tuesday? It was meant to be Friday until my best beloved had a youth club meeting she really needed to be at, and then Saturday until it transpired she'd arranged for lunch on Monday with a friend she hadn't seen in ages! But Tuesday's looking wet and cold and Wednesday not much better. Perhaps Thursday…

Meanwhile, we still haven't really quite worked out what we're doing with the garden while we're cruising. And the IT work has been going really well but isn't finished.

Sometimes you just have to get on and do it! Work it out as you go along. Like the locker covers and that paint job I know are waiting for my attention, but which I'm not quite sure how to do. Sounds a bit like my life!

Scotland's Flower

Apologies if yesterday's musical post was a bit complicated. To summarise:

The end of Flower of Scotland sounds naff if it's a bagpipe band playing. Hasn't anyone else noticed?

Flower of Scotland

The Scottish rugby crowd singing "Flower of Scotland" sound much better away from home. The reason is simple – they're not being accompanied by a bagpipe band.

Percy Scholes, in his wonderful Oxford Companion to Music, writes: "a very extraordinary scale in common use today requires a word, extraordinary in that it exists side by side with very different scales–the Scottish Highland Bagpipe Scale… The notes are roughly those to which we are accustomed in the white notes of the...piano, except that the C and the F are about a quarter-tone sharp. […] It is a somewhat romantic circumstance that one nation should have been able to preserve in actual use scales so different as the pentatonic, the diatonic major and minor scales, and the strange scale above mentioned. It is to be noted, however, that this last scale is in use only instrumentally, and it would be interesting to know whether any Scot but a bagpiper could, if called upon, sing it or its tunes correctly." (10th ed, p918)

I remember the Corries, who wrote this song, singing it in Edinburgh in the 1970s, to the accompaniment of a number of instruments, some of which they had invented. But not the Highland bagpipes. Again, the reason is simple – their songs used various scales that are completely beyond the great pipes. You hear the problem on the third last note of "Flower of Scotland". It's a minor 7th. The pipes can only manage something a semitone higher. Consquence – at Murrayfield the pipe band play one note, all the instincts of the crowd make them want one a semitone lower, and the result is horrible.

Relief is swift. The band plays only one verse. The crowd has taken to adding the second (actually the third), unaccompanied. They sing the right note, and natural order is restored. But at Lansdowne Road this afternoon, they were led by a brass band, the note was what the song requires, and everything was fine (if a bit um-pah-pah), though we only got one verse.

I haven't yet understood why no one has resolved this. Perhaps it's the feeling that both the song and the pipes are such symbols of Scottish identity that they must work together or, at least, that neither can be jettisoned. Am I really the only person who shudders when I hear it coming?

The Highland pipes are fine. But the Northumbrian and the Uilleann pipes are magic.

Bloggers on the move

It's been bright and sunny in Oslo the last couple of days while we've been visiting Elissa, Sam and Theo (and their parents, of course). Unfortunately, the big melt has been on for the last week, so there's oodles of dirty slush underfoot, lots of really slippy bits and, when you're off that, tons of winter grit to play havoc with plastic suitcase wheels. But it's been great boating weather.

In fact, many of the boating bloggers I keep tabs on seem to have decided it's time to make a move. They post sunny photos to match the mood and write with great enthusiasm of washed and polished paintwork, of mechanical niggles resolved, of the disposal of winter clutter. They radiate infectious joy about each passing landmark, even though you know they've been that way many times before.

Quite envious, really. We'd always thought of the end of March as the time to make our move, what with the the other stuff we've committed ourselves to. We'd thought we wouldn't be ready for life on board until then. Now that seems to have been too pessimistic a prognostication. Perhaps March will blow a wintry hoolie and make us glad we're still snug in the South.

Wonder what Erin Mae's thinking. Perhaps we should pay her a visit and find out.

A musical weekend

We went to "An audience with John Jonathan Veira" last night. Equal parts operatic superstar and clown. Gave us some material that would have graced Covent Garden, but mixed it up with a lot of fun stuff, accompanying himself on piano and, at one point, country guitar. Told stories from his life and had the audience in stitches. At one point he got a lady off the front row to turn the pages while he sang something fast from The Marriage of Figaro – which of course he had to interrupt to tell her to turn (or not to turn). Hilarious and wonderful. And meanwhile he had seized on the presence of a lady who – get this – does deaf-signing at some really prestigious opera-houses. He got her up to sign during this particular item, which she did brilliantly, joining in the fun. He's on tour round the UK with this show. Before it started, during the interval and afterwards he just mingled and joked with the audience. We loved it.

Then tonight, after our evening meal, we've been listening to Scriabin's Piano Concerto. Whenever I hear this, I'm amazed at how exquisitely beautiful parts of it are – the first part of the second movement is one of my all-time favourite passages. Now I've an hour to recover before the music of Lineker, Hanson and Shearer on Match of the Day.

But up there, competing with all the emotion, was the rendering of the Welsh National Anthem at Twickenham. Tears in the eyes, even for this Englishman.