4 August 2007

I’ve hit a dead end at bar 135 of ‘Music and Land’, the second movement of the string quartet. I’ve been trying one solution after another since K went on tour three days ago, but nothing I come up with seems to provide a suitable continuation from this point, which also has to be a preparation for the movement to come to an end. Only my surroundings are keeping me sane.

On the way to the bins I bumped into M, a professional gardener and a friend of the last owners of our house. He was mowing the lawn on the other side of the road, the piece of land that has been retained by our predecessors. After some small talk about his gardening and our building works, I found myself telling him, without meaning to, about the full moon on the field. Rather personal perhaps, but I did give him an edited version that he might understand. He understood, and responded in kind with some or other of his own admiring experience of the beauty of these parts. This appreciation of the landscape did not surprise me. A couple of days ago I had also intimated something about the lunar experience with W, who, in turn, had told me about his days as a farmer, when in the summer he would rise at three in the morning and let the dogs run around in the moonlight. “You felt grateful to be alive” is the exact phrase W used. Notwithstanding his claims of inadequacy at self-expression, W not only uses language vividly, but he is a true aesthete. And today M the gardener didn’t fail to empathise either. I’ve come to the right sort of place.