The Red and the Black.

Red and black was what or village choir wore for our trip to Cherburg to sing The Wreck of the Titanic on Saturday night.  It was a long way to go to perform a work that lasted just over an hour, but it was a memorable trip. It all went without a hitch, `no wrecks and nobody drownded, in fact nowt to laugh at at all` as the Stanley Holloway monologue goes, for us, though sadly not for the fifteen hundred on the Titanic exactly a hundred years earlier.    There was a harrowing exhibition at the Museum in Cherburg which really brought the awfulness of it all home to me.
Lunch on Sunday was An Experience. I ate oysters for the first time, everything tasted delicious and looked exquisite. The French just know how to do it.   
On the Friday before it was our lovely Julia`s seventh anniversary. We had a family get together and read some of her poems to each other. How we all do still miss her.

I still have a spectacular cough and cannot smell or taste anything. I hope this improves during the week as I have a very croaky voice, so will not be able to sing well for our choir trip to Cherburg for the Wreck of the Titanic,or taste the good French food.
I have been away in Bristol staying with eldest son over from US who was working at the university, and also my friend J. I went to the Bristol Art gallery to see the Leonardo da Vinci drawings (microscopically small, we were given a magnifying glass) and Eric Ravilious paintings which I love, also woodcuts by Peter Reddick who was a Quaker artist who never charged much for his works so that ordinary people could buy them.    
It is a dreary wet Easter Sunday but we need the rain. As usual I forgot to buy any Easter eggs until yesterday and not a single one could I find, all sold out.  When you think you can buy hot cross buns from Christmas onwards, it is odd that they don`t produce enough chocolate eggs, I feel I should complain to someone about it.

Raised Eyebrows

I have been poorly for about a week, watching my temperature rise and fall, feeling shivery, filling hot water bottles, coughing, sneezing, wincing at shooting pains in the head, Oh I`ve been a sorry sight. I am now recovered, just about. On the plus side, there has been a Schubert fest on Radio 3 which has been a delight, all his works played by top notchers. If I had not been ill I would never have heard it all.  Facts about Schubert: he was one of eighteen children (most of them died) and they all lived in one room. He never owned a piano, but borrowed one occasionally from a friend who signalled that the piano was free by leaving his curtains undrawn.
I was out with daughter J yesterday who went to a beauty parlour to have her legs waxed. Greatly daring, I had my eyebrows shaped, ie plucked, having noticed Judy Dench`s finely shaped eyebrows in her latest film:Marigold Hotel. What an improvement! They had become bushy and witchlike. And it was totally painless.
As well as Schubert this week, I have a superb book to read: Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese, enthralling.