Nostalgia, music and food - amongst others

Last Friday I made my way to town on the bus and managed to squeeze in a visit to the doctor as well. She finally coughed up three months worth of my blood pressure meds and when I told her that my nose, cheeks and forehead were hurting she sent me for an X-ray.  Unfortunately I couldn't go that afternoon due to a concert and the following morning I had to do some food shopping and was catching the bus at 1.30pm, so I decided to battle on a bit longer and if not better I was going to go when we are back later on the following week.  As it happened I ran out of time in the morning and had to catch the later bus, but that went partially on the motorway, so at least a lot of stopping and going and pothole dodging was avoided.

Piotr Anderszewski

The concert in the Palace of the Arts in the evening was glorious. A Polish/Hungarian pianist by the name of Piotr Anderszewski treated us to J S Bach, Szymanowski and Schumann with excellent technical proficiency and much emotional insight and verve. I have also discovered a Bach piece I have never heard or even known about. He started with the Overture in the French style in B minor. It was a revelation. I will have to find a YouTube rendering of this on the harpsichord, as I presume it was composed for that back in the 18th century.

After a nice long snooze on the bus I arrived back in the village with a suitcase full of food and in the dark. The weather started going very mild, which since then got cold again, but the weekend was sunny and mild.  However, due to my sinusitis and other facial cavities giving me pain (including my teeth) I had to stay indoors.  Very annoying indeed!

Steak, chips, mushrooms, tomatoes and sprouts for Roy and salmon with the same for me

The process of eating the content of the freezer still continues.  Roy is happily finding all manner of goodies, including sausages and steak.  I manged to drag a small piece of salmon in the suitcase, so our Sunday lunch was at least somewhat special, although we are not normally bothered to keep to bourgeois convention on the topic of when you are supposed to eat what and with what. For once Roy's plate looks much more impressive than mine, but I still enjoyed it. The drink was Buffalo beer, which is really gorgeous.  It is an ale, which is half way between lager and bitter and we both love it.

During the week we spent a lot of time watching TV and on the internet, especially when it got pretty cold again.  No snow this time, just cold.  The little birdies are eating non-stop all day, so the seed is going fast.  We ought to make an effort to get to the agricultural shop in the nearby town to replenish stocks soon.  If nothing else, the fact that the piece of fat I put up 6 weeks ago was all but gone, would have told me that it was really winter.  Last year in that really mild weather I finally had to throw the fat away, as they didn't touch it and it went off.

Yulianna Avdeeva

On Thursday then we caught the 9 o'clock bus and made good time into town. After we locked up and were sitting on the bus we realised that the indoors stop cock has not been turned to locked.  Hopefully it will not matter as the main stop cock in the pit was shut off. Since we have been in we have been busy doing a few things. The first was another concert, this time in the Music Academy with a young and brilliant female Russian pianist, Yulianna Avdeeva.  She won the 2010 Chopin piano competition in Warsaw (only the fourth woman in the 80 year history of the event to do so) and she lived up to her reputation.  Her excellent technique as well as her deep musical and emotional intelligence made the evening a real treat. She treated us to one of Mozart's sonatas, some very passionate and loud Liszt and Chopin's 24 preludes op. 28. I must get one of her records, shame she wasn't selling any of them at the concert.

On Friday late morning I had my X-ray, which doesn't seem to say anthing too drastic, so hopefully the doctor, when I go and see her on Monday, will either do nothing further or give me some anti-biotics or not even that. Referral to ear, nose and throat is not on the cards, but who knows.  In fact, my experience in the X-ray department made me realise that I could have gone last Friday, as I had the most amazing experience I have ever had in that place.  We went in, I got a number out of the machine, before we sat down I was called, they told me to go and wait outside door 5 and by the time I took my coat, hat, scarf and two fleeces off I was taken in and X-rayed. We were in and out of there in less than 20 minutes.  World record!!

The entrance door to our flat: 3rd floor no. 14

It was lunch time by the time we finished there and we decided to go on a small nostalgia trip to the district where I grew up and then go for lunch in a local restaurant. I have recently got involveld with a FB group where people post lovely old photos and felt like doing a bit of personal recminiscing myself. When we got to the block where our flat was the main door was open, due to some building work going on.  That was lucky, because normally it is very difficult to get in if you don't live there. They have just repainted the block, so it looked new and pristine in pretty yellow.  On closer inspection, however, you could see that most of the floor tiles in the staircase were old and none of the window frames have been changed since before the war, if not earlier. The railings were still the same as in my childhood, so were the stone stairs.  The garden looked pretty much the same, overgrown and unkempt, but it all brought back some nice memories and I took lots of pictures with my nice new camera.

The corridor where even Stephen sat about as a baby

The lunch was really nice, Roy had a Gypsy roast and I had some roast vegetables with sesame seeds. We carrried on walking after lunch and came back to the hospital to pick up the results of the X-ray by another route.  Today we stayed indoors all morning, catching up on the computer, and only popped out to the local Tesco Express for a spot of food shopping. Shopping with a suitcase on wheels has become an easy way to carry home heavy loads and today there was two of us to share the load.

The staircase with the entrance door to our corridor

The "Enticer" restaurant where we had lunch

Tomorrow, provided the weather is decent, I am going hashing and hopefully Roy will join us for a post run lunch somewhere. Next week is full of activity, a concert and a theatre visit, plus Roz and Ian are arriving with the van from Lindfield with their furniture to move into their new flat, so I am looking forward to seeing it and them.