guilty pleasure, small confession

At the risk of showing my cards I have to make a small confession: I simply love Desert Island Discs (much better than Private Passions). I guess it might be considered a bit naff listening to 'bits' of classical music, cropped, intertwined with conversation and reminisces. Shouldn't music exist and be listened to in some pure exalted realm, a desert island, precisely? (You remember Hasan telling you how noisy the Chinese were when listening to opera, how it was a whole family outing that lasted for hours and hours). In a box, people blocked out, thoughts and memories temporarily put to one side, the will receptive, music that takes you away from yourself, not back? If music is timeless what has it got to do with a specific place, a moment in time, one's individual, unreliable memories?

Do you remember the first time you heard this? Why is that important?

How to choose words that chime with the lives we lead, how to conceal words so that their meaning is half-hidden?

---John Graham.

Ronald Searle: Once you're a prisoner, you never cease from being a prisoner.

Small confessions made in the small hours of the night hardly ever amount to much. At night much of the façade we build around ourselves falls away and we tell truths to ourselves, but in the cold light of the day we regain our senses, our confidence in the solid and reassuring world returns. Then, once again, we discern the clear outlines that distinguish one thing from another. All sorts of distinctions are set up, established, maintained. The hands fold, like a book shut close, and you remember that the '&' in me and you was only a dream.

Happy is he who has travelled much, experienced much, and returned home. Slate, slanting, wet, grey. Blotches of moss sprouting in the grooves of the corrugated garage roof. Images of the sea. Fifty one beans (French) , nearly ready to eat-or so Ubo promises. What, that's nearly one a week! A cool summer breeze and the rustling of leaves, the dizzying flight of a fly, the humming traffic; all this seems eternal today. A day, an hour? How long does anything last?

Now, for some Rowan Williams...quite boring, actually. An ideas man; as a person: less interesting, methinks.