I don’t really like satsumas, but I have to buy them for my parents who like them because they’re easy to peel and eat, and if you’re lucky, have no pips in. What I hate about buying them is that it’s so hard to get out of a supermarket without two bags of them. I never want more than about half of one bag, let alone two. I have probably thrown away more old, dry or rotten satsumas than anything else in the house.
The ones I got at Sunfresh in Tooting were large, juicy, sweet, easy to peel, and 59p per pound. Price at Sainsbury’s? 5 satsumas in a bag, £2.00 (40p each), 5 loose, £1.37. Price per kilo, £2.50, or per pound, £1.13 – which is nearly double the price of Sunfresh.
The other big surprise today was that the things I’d assumed were much cheaper in Sainsbury’s – regular brand stuff like Kleenex, Andrex, and packs of kitchen roll etc., were more or less the same price (£1.99 instead of £1.98 for loo-rolls for example) not allowing for any temporary special offers. I now understand that all the hours I’ve spent examining the special offers in Sainsburys on these things is wasted. I could walk to the end of my road and do just as well, but until I started this 30-days-without-a-supermarket challenge, I hadn’t bothered to check.
dear jonathan, by now your long in-progress dissertation must be encyclopedia-in-progress, but i still hold out for the idea of a fowler’s-english type of encyclopedia which you could have tossed off in a couple years, or, if slighter, an ambrose bierce in a few months…i hope you’re not going for britiannica
you, maestro j, now, actually, ARE the britannica of ballet accompanists…but these days there’s no point in you trying to get all that info down on the page: there’s no point in you (or any of us in our lesser scope) blogging-advising-instructing pianists about how to accompany ballet class: live accompanied ballet class is becoming as absurd as the ballet teacher accompanying his students on a violin while he teaches
ballet class accompanists will soon no longer exist, more trouble than they’re worth
jonathan, it’s happened: your biography, employment history and developing expertise is now worthy of a book (at least a devil’s dictionary): rehearsal pianist and memoirist of how you started out, how it went, how it developed, who you saw, what you overheard, who you got to know (who you had sex with)
i hope jonathan will write not a book (or instruction manual) about ballet class (they don’t use accompanists any more) but an autobiography about how he became a pianist, how as a pianist he got hired into and promoted into ballet at britain’s highest level, the stories, the people
It’s not that it’s an encyclopaedia, it’s just a very slow gestation period. So slow, in fact, that the demise of the pianist that you predict may well have happened by the time I actually have my viva, in which case I’ll have to explain a lot. Though in fact, my thesis is not actually about ballet pianists except as part of the wider multiple mediations of music in notation, recording, discourse etc. I read a novel recently, based on the author’s experience as the child of a man who had been a cinema pianist, which documented the very abrupt end of that particular profession once the talkies came in. It read for all the world like the final hymn in memorial service for the profession of ballet pianist as well. I am not quite as convinced yet that the end of our world is in sight, though I see the portents of it, i.e. when as you say we become “more trouble than they’re worth.” That’s because we need ballet teachers attuned to what we do as much as a reel of 1/4″ tape needs the right machine to play it. Curiously, it doesn’t seem to be related to age, but to experience. There are 20 year-olds who are great at working with us, and much older people who aren’t, because they haven’t had to develop the relationship or the attunement. But just as there are still Jungians in a world of six-session online CBT modules, I don’t think we’ll ever quite be done with.
Don’t worry, I have no intention or desire to write an instruction manual about ballet class, because I’m not sure that such a thing can ever function as what it purports to do. I have been pondering for a long time your idea of the Fowler’s, and think it’s a very good idea. Another idea, after I picked up E M Forster’s commonplace book in a second hand bookshop the other day, was to do it as a commonplace book, which was in fact kind of the model I always had in my mind, once I’d discovered commonplace books. I’m currently reading Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” (Passagenwerk) which amounts to much the same thing in a way, a couple of decades of notes and footnotes and quotations from which he never finished the intended output—but notes itself are almost more interesting than any logically argued text based on them. I have to do it for myself, even if not for an audience.