Lockdown memories in space

Fascinating podcast "All in the Mind" from BBC Radio 4 this week on the pandemic's impact on memory, with an interview with Professor Catherine Loveday from the University of Westminster. It seems people are not remembering as well during lockdown, though once they're out and about again, their memories get better again. It's something to do with having different physical places for different activities. 

That's one reason I've set up my work and play computers in different rooms. I've taken advantage of still having all the space we needed for our combined family, but they've all gone, leaving us rattling around in this mansion. I can do online tae kwon do in the dining room - no one's come to dine with us for months so I've pushed the table to one side and stuck my little laptop on it. And I can do online choir in there cos it's next to the piano.

There're memory techniques. A technique that memory champions use to memorise a load of things like a sequence of 52 cards (why would you want to?) is called memory palace. They visualise a space and place that they associate with each number and apparently the technique works. 

That sounds similar to the BBC's report - get out and about, meet people and you remember better.  I must get out more.

Singing in isolation, and singing in choirs

Tweeted 23 October: Ben England BEM

Having now received 1000s of recordings from singers there’s a common theme: “Here’s my awful submission, please don’t listen to it. My voice is terrible, you’ll need whisky just to endure it”. Dear friends thank you for your hard work. Please relax, you are all wonderful x Smiling face with smiling eyes

Choirs were banned. Church choirs, community choirs, choral societies, all were banned. We might give ourselves corona virus. 

Indeed we might. I'd been in the local Next Stage Choir only just over a year when a choir member gave me a divil of a cold. She turned up for a performance, standing next to me, with her nose dripping and her tissues dropping as she sang. She had to come she said. Humph. Please don't.

So no choirs since March. But the Self Isolation Choir started rehearsing Messiah on YouTube live, and it was wonderful. The warm ups worked, and the director, Ben England explained to clear your throat in a way I hadn't known, and it works. And he encouraged his choristers even though he couldn't hear them. Instead of a one hour rehearsal shared between sops, altos, tenors and basses, we got an hour each. And he had this lovely group of professional singers to demonstrate each part. It was fun chatting to others across the world in the YouTube chat box. It was glorious music to learn. 

And then he told us to record it.

No. 

Recording is a technical pain, and when you hear your own voice by itself, you notice all the mistakes you made, mistakes that you'd have avoided if singing next to someone else, or that would have blended in the full voice of a choir. I recorded two. I uploaded one. 

Then the SIC ran a summer school with more beautiful music to learn, so I joined that, and recorded and uploaded two pieces. In the meantime, NSC carried on using Zoom three or four times a week so I learned those musicals, pop, and folk as well. When choirs were allowed together again, we met in September all suitably spaced and safe. To the surprise and pleasure of our NSC director, we knew the music and could sing well together. We just have to relearn to watch him conducting.  At the last same space rehearsal, our NSC director commented on choir members' increased confidence. 

Ben England tweeted:

Further to yesterday, it’s amazing how recordings of isolated voices blend together like coats of paint. With 3 or 4 voices, the sound “coverage” is big, with 80+ it’s huge! Everyone can contribute (just like a choir!) & of course this way any happy accidents can be edited out... https://pic.twitter.com/dATu8zdo4V

Lock down SIC training from Ben England has increased confidence, friendships and musical ability. 

Foxes

Last night, both husband and lodger were awakened by a loud bark. A fox must have been in our back garden to wake them. I've heard and seen the foxes in the street; only a couple of weeks ago a couple of them stopped in the road to bark at each other one evening. 

Foxes look pretty. I don't mind them out in the country and they provide some value by keeping the rat population down. But I do wish there weren't foxes in Aylesbury town centre.  They're bold. Last summer I met one in our garden when I went down to open the hen run and found a fox sitting sunning itself a metre away. Foxes trot up the street, on the way into town, even at nine in the morning, only diverting if people get too close to them. They've taken a neighbour's pet rabbit and several of my hens. 

In January, two foxes jumped into our garden, snaffled two of my three hens, leaving the third, Custard, traumatised, sad and lonely. I suspect that a vixen was pregnant last summer and has raised cubs, and that's what's caused the extra movement and barking. Pests.

A stonking day promises

 Looking at today's weather at La Motte du Caire, a stonking day promises.

The light is right, and the pilots know it because they've already rigged so many gliders and are milling for the briefing.

Would that I were there

Am I a difficult woman?

Am I a difficult woman? Helen Lewis has recently published a book, "Difficult women" that explores the history of women labelled difficult. Difficult  doesn't mean being horrid, just complicated, and possibly not nice. Lewis writes about a host of complicated women, not all of whom are feminists, just awkward women, as Helen Lewis herself can be!
Recently to be a plethora of books about "Difficult Women", "Invisible Women" (Caroline Criado Perez), Bloody Brilliant Women"(Cathy Newman) have been published. And there's Yvette Cooper's "She speaks", Karen Brady's "Strong Woman" and Deborah Frances-White's "The Guilty Feminist". They cover the usual themes of power, getting to the top, trail blazing, being recognised despite being the second sex, the aberrant body of a male. These are good writers, expressing well ideas that many woman have but don't have the skill or the power to express.
Usually I don't identify myself with the women being written about, like I'm not at the top of my tree, or any tree! I don't trail blaze, am recognised for nothing. But, Lewis has picked on one thing I've done and when I did it, it raised a few eyebrows, caused a few comments. Lewis refers to Anna Coote and Tess Gill, and they influenced me. In the seventies, they wrote a small book that argued why women needn't change their name when they married. In the seventies, eighties, even the nineties women changed their surname. HR departments sometimes did it without permission - it was just assumed.
But when I married, I didn't change my name, but kept my father's. Yes, it's still the name of a male, but it was part of the identity I'd grown up with. When my mother and then my cousin asked if I was changing my name, I realised that some people important to me thought it was no longer absolutely essential to take your husband's. My less advanced-thinking to-be-MiL wailed, "But there'll be no second Mrs C!" "What nonsense!" I thought, and politely pointed out that her other son had already married, so she did have a second Mrs C. When I walked into the unemployment benefit office to tell them I was getting married (I thought they'd change or stop my benefit), they said they only needed my married name. Well why would they need that information?! I stated, "I'm not changing it!" and walked out - they hadn't been kind or helpful in there. I was happy to be awkward (difficult?) for that UBO. I guess it was trail blazing because no one else was keeping their maiden name in those days. So yes, sometimes I can be a difficult woman.

The Messiah

"Oh we, like sheep" The Messiah is a Handel's choral work that my dead husband used to play of an evening. We'd stop work, studying OU courses or stop marking, fixing the house, paying bills, whatever, and at nine thirty sit down together for a while in our sitting room on a comfy sofa. It was a time to chat, chat about nothing in particular, just whatever came up. Just time together. And he'd put on a record or a CD. Mostly he put on Bach, but The Messiah was definitely one of his favourites. Being more comfortable with modern pop, I was a bit fazed initially by some of his choices. "Oh we like sheep...." really threw me as I couldn't hear the next bit several bars later "have turned". So I'd sing in the gap, "And I like lamb". I was mocking it, and DH would smile. After he died, I played his music to keep me company. I had a few dates, and the best one was to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I married that date.
In January this year, a neighbour told me that the local choral society was learning to sing The Messiah. I've never sung it, heard it lots but never thought of singing it. No - when I joined the Next Stage Choir, a partnering choir suggested we sing The Hallelujah Chorus, so I'd learned that, or tried to learn to sing it and assessed myself as pants, but still enjoyed it.
I joined the local choral society intending to learn, not perform on March 25th. The choir master is great at teaching us to sing emotion. For example, singing "Unto us a child is born" he told each part to think of themselves as parents or grandparents. This child is born - the mother and father are the sopranos and tenors, the grandparents are the altos and basses. And of course I could think of my newly born grandson.
In the event, the concert was cancelled because of lock down, and I still couldn't sing most of it very well. I was getting better at the Hallelujah chorus. However, a self isolation choir sprang up: The Self Isolation Choir. Thousands of us  from all over the word, England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, US, log into a YouTube live recording several days a week for the director, Ben England to teach us to sing and we're singing The Messiah. We had pdf copies of the music and access to Choraline. We had to video ourselves singing in time to a click track, then upload each piece. So we've had to learn some new technical skills too. It's come together into a decent performance, so good that it got publicity on BBC radio and TV yesterday. Our live performance will be on https://www.theselfisolationchoir.com/ this Sunday evening. I shall stop marking at 7.30 and sit down in our sitting room on a comfy sofa for the evening to listen, watch and join The Messiah. This time I'll sing more than "We like sheep"

Tae kwon do under lock down

Are you keeping fit during lock down? Or too miserable to be bothered?
 "CV won’t worry you - axe kick it! "said my tkd friend
Bytomic tae kwon do has kept me and other students fit by presenting classes despite the lock down on Facebook Live, but has done even better now by offering us feedback via Zoom classes. Last weekend, I took part in an interim grading for black belt practising in our dining room. Hurrah!
This is so much better than this time last year. You're supposed to do an interim grading at least once a year once you get to black belt, but last year I couldn't cos my retinas fell off and the medics told me not to do any jumping (probably would have been better telling me to sort my infected tooth). So it was extra special that I had the chance to do the interim this way. It's not that I did well or badly; it's that I could do it, last the hour of high intensity exercise and sequences of movements at a high standard.
After an operation, you're vulnerable to infections because the anesthetic reduces your immune response. If we hadn't had lock down, after my op I would have followed medical advice and not gone to tae kwon do classes for two months. The lock down however gave me opportunities to watch on line, and realised that I can still do squats, and lunges and kicks and punch and block with my left arm, so I could keep doing a lot.
Our neighbours shop for us, and I have some online shopping. One neighbour saw on FB my need for tonic to go with my gin and passed a bottle over the wall. Otherwise things are as normal because my work, at a distance for 30 years, carries on as normal.
Enjoying the solitude like Georges Moustaki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9-OzSzCDWo 

Ten days ago

It's been a difficult six or seven weeks. Ten days ago I was just out of hospital after an operation for cancer. I had to have a mastectomy after I was diagnosed with recurrence of breast cancer, in February. The hospital was a bit quiet, almost empty. I got in under the wire, before all other operations were stopped. The surgeon rang the week before to prevent me having to go in for a F2F and she offered me a choice:

• Increase my risk of catching the virus by coming in for the op.
• Wait  six months.

She said that she was delaying all the BCs she'd diagnosed in March, but she was prepared to go ahead with mine. But I had to understand the risks. Then she repeated the discussion at my bedside on the day of the operation to ensure I was fully aware of the risks. One woman decided to not have her op and left. Thank you to those 11-12 medics that treated me on Wednesday: physiotherapist, radiologist, anesthetist, surgeon, unaesthetic nurse, trainee nurse, nurse practitioner, staff nurse and other nurses.
I had to make difficult choices that week.
Now it's ten days ago. I don't yet have symptoms of CV19. I hope those medics also are still healthy.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich)

Updated FB profile picture

In December last year 2019 Bytomic tae kwon do awarded me

Spirit of Tony Lobato

 the "Spirit of Tony Lobato" 2019 award.

Now I really am going to need that spirit again and that the Bytomic club awarded me this means that I shall live up to it. I have to, don't I?

Making God laugh

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans"
said my Serbian landlady last week when I was staying at the Two Roses B&B in St George, Ontario in February I was visiting my daughter, enjoying the biting cold weather, the flurries of snow and a full day's skiing out at Mount St Louis and Moonstone. We also did karate, shooting, and visited a sauna/spa.
I had some plans for March:

• lots of tae kwon do to make up for what I missed last year when my retina fell off and I wasn't allowed to jump for months. 
• speech making at Toastmasters to finish the Bronze award that got stuck years ago when I was on aromatase inhibitors
• SiL's OU graduation ceremony
• sGrandchild #3's drama performance
• trip to Liverpool with the choir
• a dental appointment

Then I got told my BC is back and although on the whole (some tests yet to come back) it's not an advanced cancer, treatment is messing up my plans. After an op, I'll not be doing so much at the end of the month, less tkd, no trip to Liverpool, and I'm already back on the aroma-nasty-ase inhibitors!
Lesson: Do not tell God your plans.

Things yet to do - experiences yet to try

Opportunities are when preparation meets luck says Professor Lucy Rogers, https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=nv9R9SnlUbw 

SD#3 gave me a book on "The Luck Factor" by Richard Wiseman and the first principle is about making your own luck, partly by finding new experiences, things you've never done before.  So I asked Facebook friends, to write me a list of up to six events / experiences to help me choose things I've not yet done. Here's what they suggested:

• Find your local hobby shop and join a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Or similar. Playing an in-person pen and paper Role Playing game is a great way to meet new people and discover things about yourself through playing a fantasy character.
• Go on a silent retreat at St Beunos - it’s wonderful !!
• Ride a camel (have you done that?). Ideally galloping across a desert somewhere, belting out the Indiana Jones theme tune at the top of your voice.
•  Learn to play a musical instrument.
• Teach yourself a non-latin script (Thai, Hindi, Chinese)
• 👏If you have to ask us, Liz that means you have probably already done most things you want to experience... New.... 😎 However, have you... 1-walked naked through a cornfield at dawn... 2-Scaled the outside of the Eifel Tower 🗼 dressed as wonder woman... 3-Run into the underwear department of M&S and shouted "knickers"... 4-(you might enjoy this one) Sat in a bath of baked beans for charity... 5-Given a Ted talk on religious metaphors in CBBC programmes...6-Given a man the benefit of the doubt...
• Cross a mountain col in a blizzard; get caught out on a mountain ridge in a sudden electrical storm. Neither to be recommended, but worth the experience. Assuming you survive.
• Learn to knit socks (if you can’t already). Learn swing dancing. I can help with both these options.
• Had an affair?
• Taken class A drugs?
• Fiddled your tax return?
• See the Northern Lights
• Get a puppy

Knowing about the people who posted these, I realise that of course they recommend things that they've done and really enjoyed and would want others to enjoy the experience too. That's friendship. Isn't it nice that one offered to help me learn. There's a lot of learning: new scripts, knitting, a language, dancing.

1. Take the first experience, playing Dungeon and Dragons. That suggestion has already led to a new opportunity because I told sgs#1 of the suggestion and how I knew a local shop where I could join in and he suggested that instead I should go round their house for a game and gave me reasons why it would be nicer. I wouldn't be meeting new people but his reasons were good.
2. A silent retreat: not done a retreat since I was a teenager and I must look up St Beunos. I wouldn't get to meet people to talk to them, would I?
3. Ride a camel: yes - I'd forgotten I did that with late husband when we visited Morocco. Didn't gallop. But the suggestion reminded me of a teenage wish to gallop across the plains of Mongolia on a horse. I am advised to read Christina Dodwell’s books because she did that. I looked for the books but they're out of print so I'll have to search.
4. Play a musical instrument: I'm not motivated any more. I played the piano, the guitar, the mandolin once. Piano and guitar I still play occasionally. Now I like singing in a choir and meet more people. That way I make more opportunities. Opportunities have already occurred cos I joined the choir, like going to a recording studio and making an album, or the wedding party earlier this month. 
5. Non-Latin script: interesting suggestion and I've looked at Korean because of tae kwon do coming from Korea. It wouldn't get me meeting people.
6. Knitting seems solitary too
7. Swing dancing: yes - I'll find out about that
8. Northern lights; yes - I've wanted to for years. Husband's not interested. I want to go this January weekend to Toronto, but again he's not interested because it's cold. I want to go even if it is cold. I want to see my DD
9. Puppy: thought about that. My teenage DS wanted a puppy, and if I still had a teenage son at home, I'd be tempted. 

I wonder why some of the illegal or ridiculous suggestions came from men, men I know who often say things with a wink and their tongue in their cheek. Would I admit to fiddling my tax return? No more than I'd admit to anyone if I kept (I don't) a baseball bat next to my chicken run. I can't see that those experiences would lead to good luck. Ah! I didn't say I wanted good luck. But I do. So far this year, luck hasn't been very kind to me, so I have to improve it. That means I'll take up some of these suggestions. Thank you friends.

Your first drink

A radio programme this week asked its participants what their first drink was. Most of them had illicit drinks with friends in the evening, but my first drink was given to me by my auntie. Aunty Grace was having a party and I was there along with my mother and other family and though I can't remember the reason for the party perhaps it was my cousin's 21st. I would have been about 12. There were these sweet yellow creamy drinks. I had two or them and was on my third, asking Aunty Grace what they were and if I could have another please.
"What are you drinking?"
"Snowballs".
Auntie yelped in horror. It turned out I was drinking a cocktail of lemonade and advocaat.
"Don't tell your mother!" Aunty worried.
I never told, but now years later, I wonder if I could have shared that story with her when I was grown up and Aunty G would no longer have been in trouble, but they could have laughed about it together.