Danskcolin: Friday August 18th 2023

A busy day today at our daughter Alison's house in Hampshire, preparing for tomorrow's Golden Wedding party - food preparation is the priority.

And Lois and I go upstairs to our bedroom to break out some of the "party supplies" and make a start on the balloons. I'm still okay when I'm pumping, but my fingers and Lois's fingers are not what they used to be when it comes to tying knots in little things. Oh dear! Still we make a start, which is nice!

Meanwhile, poor Ali, our daughter, also has her usual timetable of lists of places to ferry our granddaughters and sons to today - Josie (16) has her final day of her week-long lifeguard training today, and we find out later that she passes and gets her qualification, despite the misgivings she was telling us about yesterday. She's now thinking of applying for a summer job at the swimming pool at Haslemere.

And Isaac (13) has a Mandarin Chinese tutorial to be driven to. Busy, busy, busy! And Ed, Alison's husband, who works from home most days, today has a business lunch at the Holly Bush pub at Frensham which is nice.

The Holly Bush pub at Frensham

14:00 As usual, after a busy morning, Lois and I go to bed in the afternoon to recharge our batteries, but we get up around 4pm to have a cup of tea and take our usual look at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times.

We score only middling, 6 out of 10 results on Popmaster and Eggheads, and we're particularly annoyed at our poor result on Pointless. But who's ever heard of the two so-called "well-known" phrases, "There's no little enemy" or "there's no royal road to learning". Lois and I have never heard these phrases even once in our entire lives, which are both long ones, as you know. My goodness yes!!!!

It's utter madness !!!!

18:30 We have dinner - and everybody's here, which is nice!

And dessert is blackberries and cream - blackberries that Lois picked this morning from the bushes round this house's huge grounds. What a woman I married !!!!!

20:00 Balloon work continues into the evening.

We need to keep all these balloons safe from the attention of the family's two cats, and we decide in the end on what they call "the pink room", which makes sense.

21:00 Time for a bit of culture. Lois and I sneak into what they call "the family room" and just about manage to catch the first half of the BBC Proms concert that was broadcast on BBC4 earlier in the evening.

We hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Fischer, with pianist Andras Schiff, two Hungarians, neither of whom are big fans of the country's Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, apparently.

We notice immediately that in contrast to the BBC's orchestras, the players tonight are predominantly, although by no means exclusively, male, which Lois says is the norm with most Continental orchestras - they've generally been slower to accept women, she says.

The story of Robert and Clara Schumann is one of the great love stories in the history of music. And in the pre-concert chat session between pianist Andras Schiff and conductor Ivan Fischer, we hear how Schumann managed to get his wife's name into the concerto.

Get it? Well, we don't understand that either, but we're sure that Schiff knows his stuff, so I expect he's right, as usual !!!!

And in the BBC pre-concert chat session with presenter Clive Myrie, we hear how it was Clara who persuaded Robert to turn this piece into a full length piano concerto, which took Robert 4 years to complete, so it kept him out of her hair at the same time perhaps, who knows!

Clara was a huge influence in Robert's life. She was a great concert pianist in her own right, who really invented the idea of the modern piano recital, we hear. She was also one of the first pianists to play from memory, and to bring a poetic sensibility to her playing.

in the BBC pre-concert chat session, the relationship

of Robert and Clara Schumann is discussed - "one of the great

love stories in the history of music"

A masterful performance by the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff of Schumann's Piano Concerto is followed by particularly fervent calls for an encore. Once again I long for the pianist who has the courage to just play "Chopsticks" on these occasions, but once again it doesn't happen, which is a pity!

But there's a different surprise when the whole orchestra pulls out song-sheets and sings along to one of Brahms's "Gypsy Songs", as Schiff "tinkles the ivories".