#21 – 1984 Week 24: The worst Monday morning in history has just taken place.
and then, oh no, the Pram Race.
Monday 11 June 1984
163-203 Week 24
The worst Monday morning in history has just taken place. Yes, you’ve guessed it – English Criticism. Thank goodness it is over. I shall forget it for a while. In the afternoon we had French Lit. which was average. One of the questions was good, the other bad, like the curate’s egg.
Afterschool (a new time of day) parents and Ethan went to a Milstein concert in London. That bugger Jon Thorne came round for a while, but I soon threw him out. Then I was caused to ring up Sophie and then I tried to revise some English Lit, but I gave up and started to read Tom Jones instead.
Exams aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. Only a short pain and a bit of waffle here and there, and that’s that.
2024: Bother. I wish I’d gone to this concert. I guess I was in the middle of exams. Nathan Milstein was born in Odessa in 1904, the fourth child of seven, to a middle-class Jewish family with no musical background. A concert by the 11-year-old Jascha Heifetz inspired his parents to make a violinist out of Nathan and at seven he started violin lessons to keep him out of trouble. When Milstein was 11, Leopold Auer invited him to become one of his students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Milstein reminisced: “Every little boy who had the dream of playing better than the other boy wanted to go to Auer. He was a very gifted man and a good teacher. I used to go to the Conservatory twice a week for classes. I played every lesson with forty or fifty people sitting and listening. Two pianos were in the classroom and a pianist accompanied us. When Auer was sick, he would ask me to come to his home.” Leopold Auer was my great-great-great-great-great uncle. A distant connection, I know, but one that I have enjoyed dining out on a lot over the years. It would have been good to go to this concert.
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Tuesday 12 June
164-202 Week 24
An extremely boring day. 6 hours of boredom. In the morning 3 hours of music composition. Mostly o.k. apart from the last question, which was a Schumann song. I didn’t know how to cope with imaginativeness and wrote a load of rubbish, like Wagner, 9ths and 7ths and discords. I was too daring, and couldn’t be bothered.
In the afternoon we had French, essay and translation. I was too daring I think, and it was probably a total cock up. But you get to the stage where you don’t care. The moment is everything. Pete Farthing just sat there and scarcely wrote anything for three hours.
Really these exams are quite fun – because they finish. But I only know how to revise. Tomorrow is the big day when I pooh myself.
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Wednesday 13 June
165-201 Week 24
Got up. Ugh! Five seconds later things started becoming real, and English materialised in my brain and I fell back down and died. But I was resurrected to eternal hell.
After having got up I began to learn English quotes, because the exam was in the afternoon. However, after a couple of hours I decided that if I did not know them now, I would never know them. So I stopped and played the violin. I think I know the quotes and was feeling fairly confident. Had lunch, cycled over to Bev’s on the way to school. Stopped there and got nervous. Went on to do the exam. First question (Chaucer) was fine. And it got progressively worse from there. The last essay was a disaster, with hardly any quotes at all.
Cycled home and forgot about everything.
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2024: OK, don’t tell me that I’m the only who on reading “if I did not know them now, I would never know them” immediately thought of Simply Red, whose similarly-named hit was released 5 years later in in 1989. So there is no connection at all and I’m just mentioning it because it popped into my mind as good ear-worms do, and because it’s such a great song. But hang on Google, I didn’t know this… "If You Don't Know Me by Now" is a song written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and recorded by the Philadelphia soul musical group Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes released as a single in September 1972. I expect you all knew that, but me, I wasn’t very up on pop culture.
How good is this! And the (recent) video comments too, from people who were there, reminiscing full of emotion…
(The cool thing about a publication like this is you can go anywhere you like!)
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Thursday 14 June
166-200 Week 24
No exams. A restful day at home learning German quotes. I don’t think I am going to know what to do when these exams are over. I will have to be imaginative and make decisions. Oh dear. Anyway, as soon as the sun came out, I was with my quotes, not learning them, trying to get browninsh. Not succeeding. A nice day, were it not for the looming up of tomorrow.
Slept really badly because of the heat and the full moon.
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Friday 15 June
167-199 Week 24
One of the laziest days I have had for months. After a short pain of 1 ½ hours of German in the morning, I caught the train with Bev, Stu and Chaz to the W’s. Went for a run with them, and got left miles back, went for a swim and lay in the sun for hours and hours. Played silly games on the lawn with Bev and Stu, and felt like a kid again. Back in the pool. Then Sophie came home from school. Listened to music, played it. Got into awkward situations. A fine life they lead out there in the country. But there is something about it. Too efficient. Anyway, after a beautiful day, I got depressed. Really badly. Why? Oh, for various reasons. Looked forward to leaving and went with Bev at 11.00. We were there for 11 hours. Went to bed sad. Unhappy. That is an understatement. It was close to…
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Saturday 16 June
168-198 Week 24
Useless day spent revising music. Had a shower in the morning – how interesting. The guitar is a brilliant instrument when played melodically and harmonically colourful. Straight chords to accompany a song are an insult to the instrument. I love its sweet tone, which is beautiful with a violinist’s vibrato. Why all this? I have just got our guitar out, and it is not as bad as I thought. And it is such an impressionistic instrument. You can get amazing harmonies on it. The harmonics are so sweet and the sounds just ring away slowly, and even a beginner can play it well. I want to write some music for guitar – or any music. But I am incapable. It is extremely frustrating. It would be slow because fast things are too complicated and anyway I have a tendency towards slow music. Slow, reserved, and thus all the more expressive. But I will try never to pin my musical tastes down. Colour exists.
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2024: Ok please indulge me another very random musical diversion. When I read ‘slow music’ or ‘expressive’ I immediately think of a piece that somehow became very important to me recently. I was working from some shared office space a few years ago and this very very quiet music came on in the background on some kind of playlist. I had to ask the office manager what it was. It turns out that it has such a hard to remember name ‘Abandon Window’ that for years I kept on forgetting it and thought I’d never find it again. Was it called Broken Frame? Lost Window? I read somewhere that the mood was like sitting on the edge of a cliff and watching the end of the universe, or something…. Composer Jon Hopkins explains the more specific but equally bleak real context in the NME here. I didn’t know other music by him, but when I learned that the BBC Proms in 2023 had a concert of electronic composer Hopkins’ work performed by massive orchestra and choir, I grabbed myself a ticket. Splendid.
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Sunday 17 June
169-197 Week 24 Fathers’ Day
Father’s Day? Church at eight, work, work, work, and then oh no, the Pram Race. This is a silly thing where people run round with prams drinking pints of beer and getting hot. And my mother insists on entering every year. A few years ago me and Ethan won the race. Anyway, this year I was inevitably dragged in and we came second to last. Not my fault, I think. Afterwards I went for a short run down the hill and back up again. Why? Why do you think? And then there was a massive great thunderstorm, which I delighted in, although petrified. But it was only short.
Went to bed and couldn’t sleep a wink, so my sleave of care* got more and more tangled and I woke up knackered in the morning. Not having dreamt a thing. I am a non-dreamer.
* please refer to Monday 26 March in #10 Week 13
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2024: OK I need to find some pictures of said pram race. Katya? And looking back, serious hats off to Mum, for entering the pram race so regularly, and making us enter, and winning more than once! There are few people I know with such a beautiful, generous and energetic embodiment of community spirit as my Mama. Only two days ago she was running her regular stall at the village fete. And turns out you have to work at community spirit, it doesn’t happen just like that, so maybe the very eccentric English idea of a pram race is not so silly after all. Born at the beginning of the war in what is now Poland but was then Germany (do the maths), she experiencing loss, displacement and tough times. I can’t help thinking that sometimes generosity of spirit is born out of the difficult things we go through, whilst the creature comforts of today tend, if we are not careful, to make us more selfish.
I loved the Nathan Milstein comments under your diary entry for that day. Of course, you would have loved the concert if you'd attended. As it happens - and I know you know it - the Jewish contribution to classical music (also other forms as well) is a quite remarkable one. Just to talk about the violin - one instrument - the number of prominent Jewish violinists is astonishing. Several years ago BBC Music Magazine asked 100 violinists to name the greatest violinists and the resulting top twenty included Oistrakh, Heifetz, Milstein, Kreisler, Menuhin, Kremer, Szigeti, Stern, Perlman, Zukerman, Gitlis, Kogan and Huberman!
"Got up. Ugh! Five seconds later things started becoming real, and English materialised in my brain and I fell back down and died. But I was resurrected to eternal hell" - Fantastically teenagery (again). And wow, thanks for sharing the Jon Hopkins piece, it's beautiful.