Listening at windows
Maybe we should sing together
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Eavesdropping in Oxford
I walked past St Barnabas church last Sunday and voices dropped down as though they had floated up the bell tower first. I went around the corner to the entrance of the church and stood just outside the inner doors. A few people were gathered around a grand piano. They would sing and stop, sing and laugh. They were warming up for the service that was going to start in twenty minutes.
Vaulted spaces are the original surround-sound technology. I leaned an ear towards them, willing them to finish a full song.
Then a round-faced vicar blustered in, garments fluttering around him. He seemed late. We were both a little surprised and embarrassed to bump into someone in the narrow space. I felt like I looked guilty.
In the week, I walked to the shop one morning. The sound of singing children reached me. I went more slowly. I could see them, standing in a classroom across a field. The uneven sound of non-choir children’s voices chiming together inharmoniously – though not unpleasantly – tipped me back into hall of Rietondale Primary School, where I have more memories of singing than of being inside classrooms. I would have lingered, but lingering around schools with no obvious business is weird, so I moved on at snail’s pace.
Why does all the singing we do at primary school seem to stop in high school? Why is singing such a big part of primary school?
Why sing?
Why together?
It’s a funny thing to think about – like when you say a familiar word over and over until it becomes foreign.
I haven’t sung in a choir since I was thirteen. I don’t attend church anymore, so I can’t sing there. The kids are out of school, so Christmas carols are a thing of the past. The only singing I do now is bad singing of – mostly misheard – lyrics. I close the doors and hope the neighbours won’t hear. I put my earphones in so I can’t hear myself.
I saw a short clip about ‘the loneliness epidemic’. I wondered what the clinical definition of loneliness was and how people end up getting lonely. Could not singing in a group be a risk factor?
One evening, I went to the theatre to see a stage adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’, by Emily Brontë. On the way there, I passed a house from which piano music was coming. In dim lamplight, a young woman was bent towards her sheet music.
I hovered for a minute or two.
I’ve become a stalker of music in its domestic habitats. A listener at windows.
It’s okay not to like the play
At the Oxford Playhouse, I realised that ‘cheap seats’ might be less about the angle of your view to the stage and more about proximity to the speakers booming dramatic music and sound effects.
I almost liked the play, but I found it too loud. The actors were so shouty my throat started to get sore. There were lots of flashing lights. I got a headache.
I prefer Wuthering Heights quiet and inside covers.
Dafatir
There is a way to visit the museums of Europe without seeing so much you’re left with bean soup for brains. You pick an exhibit and let it be your date, giving it the full force of your attention. Then you leave without looking at anything else.
I noticed that the Ashmolean had a special exhibit entitled Painting Poetry. It shows the work of the Iranian artist Dia Al-Azzawi, who painted his response to poetry written by a friend, and turned the poetry and paintings into books he called ‘dafatir’ (the word means ‘notebooks’).
I spent a long time there. I don’t know how long. When I left the hall his work was exhibited in, I felt disorientated. I took a few wrong turns and was glad that I felt no internal pressure to look at anything else in this vast place.
The dafatir – their thematic obsessions, the colours, the mixture of words and images, and the making of notebooks – filled me up for days. It made me go and look again at Maia Lehr-Sacks’s work. She and Al-Awazzi have very little in common, except the folding of paper.
Friends in foreign lands
Rose couldn’t come to Oxford and our weekend plans to go into the countryside in Queenie-the-camper-van fizzled due to sickness on her side and deadline crunch on mine. Also, Queenie was coughing and the alpacas needed tending, which Rose’s under-the-weather partner couldn’t help with while he was laid low.
I was relieved – and she was relieved that I was relieved – because it meant I could work. It is possible to be both relieved and terribly disappointed at once.
I’ve been working long hours. My body is sore from sitting in wrong chairs. I have been sustaining myself on raw radishes, carrots, tomatoes, boiled eggs and chocolate. In between bursts of editing, I lie on the floor to stretch out my back, or do jumping jacks, or push-ups against the kitchen counter.
Rose, who is an occupational therapist, video-called me to see what was going on with the workstation situation and to give me some pointers. I feel like maybe everyone who works at a desk should have an alpaca-owning, camper-van-driving occupational therapist friend, just so they can write letters in which they can use all those words repeatedly to impress on the reader how very cool they themselves are by association.
On Friday, Donald texted to say he was in Oxford and was I still here and would I have lunch with him. I haven’t seen Donald since before Covid. Donald is an epicurean. When I asked Jules if she remembered Donald, she said she remembered his apron.
Of course I would have lunch with him. And it had nothing to do with being sick of radishes.
Fathima had suggested I try the Old Bookbinders Ale House in Canal Street, so I passed the tip on to Donald, who said he liked the look of it, let’s go.
It’s a cosy little old-school pub with the same ye-olde vibes the canal with its boat houses and ancient little bridges gives off. Oddly though, it serves French food. Very, very good French food. While waiting for my non-alcoholic Guinness to arrive (had to get back to work), we tussled about who should go first with their long story, but the argument resolved itself in the pleasures of food sharing and friendship. There were reasons to feel sweetly maudlin and wistfully happy to have found one another so far away from home.
Fathima arrives today and we’ll have two weeks together, though we both have to work. There’ll be walks and talks and, maybe – to honour how we became friends – there’ll be dancing.
Maybe we can sing together!
(Maybe if she reads this before she arrives, she’ll think her invitation was a bad idea.)
Lots of love,
K.
I know exactly what you mean about the music stalking, the relief and great disappointment, and wrong chairs.
So lovely to read your words, to be transported. (I haven’t sung in 60 years, except for Happy Birthday to my offspring. You might be on to something.)