Need to change my Sunday newspaper...

Although Scotland on Sunday and The Sunday Herald are good, if stodgy, reads I usually buy The Observer. Partly because I've always bought the Observer, since the days when Clive James was their TV columnist, and it was the only left-of-centre Sunday broadsheet, and partly because I like to get the UK political news in more depth than the Scottish news. Unfortunately from time-to-time I get reminded that, despite it's pretensions to being a national paper, the Observer is only an English one. Mostly this comes up in sports reporting, and mostly when England lose at something. Yesterday Wales secured a Triple Crown (beating the other home nations in rugby union's Six Nations tournament, a rare achievement) and Scotland beat England in rugby's oldest international fixture, winning the Calcutta Cup (an even rarer accomplishment - I think that was the third time they've won since the mid-Nineties). Cause for celebration for half the UK, you would think. Coverage of this was bumped off the front page of the sports section in favour of an English FA Cup match, and an English athlete trying to get back into the Olympics.
 The next two pages were basically a whine about how badly England had played, and something about an English player being dropped for having a lemonade in Dover Street on Wednesday night.  It was "A horrible game, a blot on the Six Nations",  and "An ugly game, one of the ugliest played at this wind-swept stadium". Little was said about an English forward sliding in with his knees up to hospitalise Rory Lamont, and nothing at all about one of the most horrible body checks I've ever seen in the international game. England were, indeed, ugly, slow and inept, but Scotland played out of their skins to make them look that way. Oh, and if you move on to the next two pages you can discover that Wales didn't win the triple crown, a "tame" Ireland fell short.

You could say that sport is a small matter, but since I can get coverage of UK politics in the Scottish papers, I think I'll be picking up Scotland on Sunday next week, where my country's sport will be covered, instead of England's.

Mostly for Bill

The spirit of Doom lives on...

Following the Lieder

To say that I'm unfamiliar with German music of the 19th Century is almost as much of an understatement as saying that I'm a little rusty on particle physics. Actually, more of an understatement, since I was at a party with Stephen Hawking in 1992 (the sod tried to chat up my girlfriend).
But unblinkered is a huge fan of Ian Bostridge, who was performing in Glasgow tonight at the City Halls, so off we trotted.
I might have mentioned somewhere before that classical music forms a pretty vast lacunae in my cultural map, and, as ever, I enjoyed gazing into the abyss. It was an enjoyable night on a number of levels. Dinner, for example, was all-you-can eat Tapas at Arta, one of my favourite pubs, and a place I haven't been to for a long while. The concert, as I said, was in the City Halls, a venue I've never been at. The closest I've made it in the past was having tickets for a Steve Earle gig, which he cancelled on the grounds of being in prison, and a couple of very good nights at the old Fruitmarket next door.
It was a strange crowd for me. For a start, I was one of the youngest people there - which made unblinkered the baby of the hall. I realised that these people must really love their music, since they're investing such a high proportion of their remaining life-spans to it.
Bostridge, I suspect, is growing more like his music - he looks kind of like Will Self after six months on the Atkins diet, or like an elongated, bronchial poet. His co-recitalist was the little to his large, and his opposite in terms of animation and cheerfulness as well.
The actual performance was enchanting - to watch someone who's the best there is at what they do is always a joy, and he was obviously enjoying himself. On the other hand - how did I know he was the best? I have no experience of listening to tenors. Ask me to recommend the best curry shop in Glasgow, and I'll tell you - I've eaten in 20 or 30 of them (it's currently The Wee Curry Shop at the bottom of Byres Road). You can argue with me (you'll be wrong, but you can argue with me) but the point is that I've an idea of what makes a good curry shop. I have no idea what makes a good tenor. He sounded wonderful to me, but you could tell me there were 20 better, and I'd have to believe you (apologies to William Goldman, for stealing this argument from Hype and Glory).
I also enjoyed following the text in the English translation, which was printed in the program along with the original German. It strikes me as a great way to learn the language. OTOH, again, the translations made the original songs seem like very drippy stuff indeed, except for the last piece, The Doppleganger, which struck me as very much Gothic before its time. I also got wondering about the origins, and the definition, or romanticism, and the degree to which Warren Zevon's lyrics were influenced by Schubert. Yes, I wonder about the strangest things.

We finished off the evening with a nightcap in Oran Mor, and now I'm looking forward to the rest of my birthday week. I'm being taken out for a meal on Wednesday, I'll be boozing in good company at the Bon Accord on Saturday, and I'm determined to fit a day or two in at the cottage in between.