Tuesday, 29th October, 2024

[Day 1688]

Yesterday did not start off particularly well. I received a text from the care company informing me that owing to staff illness, notified to them at short notice, could I act as an assistant to the sole carer to get Meg up and dressed in the morning. Meg was rather agitated and confused first thing this morning and she did not recognise me when I asked her several times who she thought that I was. But once up and breakfasted and with some good porridge inside her, she seemed to be in a rather calmer and more reflective mood and I think that by now she recognised me. We thought that we would only make a quick trip to pick up our newspaper because it really is a judgement call that I have to make whether Meg is sufficient 'compus mentis' for me to push her out in the wheelchair. However, two quite experienced care workers are due to call late morning which I think is quite a relief. As it turned out, we only had time for a quick flying visit up and down the hill but I was relieved that Meg seemed somewhat better after her breakfast and some fresh air. After we had both eaten our lunch together (ham, baked potato and broccoli) Meg watched our fill of the day's news and then as we were eating our lunch decided to treat ourselves to some music. We accessed YouTube and the great joy of this, from our point of view, is that the algorithm deployed now 'knows' what we like and serves up suitable offerings. We decided to listen to a performance of Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 which is one of my favourites. The performance was given by quite an elderly pianist who entered the auditorium at the Gulbenkian foundation in Lisbon to thunderous applause and had to rely upon a stick in his right hand and the helping hand of a young female assistant (who turned out to be his page turner) on the other. The performance was pretty good but not outstanding as the pianist was evidently quite stretched by some of the Mozart runs and trills particularly in the vivacious third and final movement. I had quickly taken a note of the pianist's name and it turned out to be Menahem Pressler who was a German Jew who fled to the US in 1940 although most of his family were lost in the Holocaust. But at the time of performing in Lisbon, he was actually 95 years of age and died four years later at the age of 99. So this must have been one of the last if not his last complete performance and I was absolutely amazed at the quality of the rendition given his advanced years. This, no doubt, explained the thunderous applause when he entered the concert hall and then when he completed the work.

After the teatime call of the carers, Meg and I repair to our main lounge where YouTube on a Firestick device offers us a different set of options. There were several programmes detailing the life of Mozart and in one of these, there was an attempt to ascertain Mozart's physical appearance and characteristics. Working this out is rather like trying to put together pieces of a jigsaw as there were several portraits of Mozart but none of them appear to be similar to any of the others. One of the two portraits which is often shown was said by Constanza, his wife, to be a good likeness of him but the other clues to Mozart's physical appearance has to put together notes from a series of sources. We now know that Mozart was quite a small man being about five feet in height, and was thin, pale and with wispy hair. He had an ordinary face, which was marked by the scars of the smallpox he suffered in his childhood, and in which a large nose stood out. His eyes were large and clear (apparently a deep blue colour) and he sported a thick headful of hair, with fine, wheat-colored strands pulled back in a ponytail. His hands were medium-sized, with long, slender fingers, and his mouth was small. But Mozart’s sister Nannerl once wrote that her brother’s 'hands were very small.' Mozart's left ear was missing the usual circumvolution or concha (this rare congenital malformation is now known in medical literature under the name 'Mozart's ear') To those who are enchanted by Mozart's music, it does come as a bit of a shock that the accounts that we are of his appearance do not seem match up at all with the celebrated heights that his music attains. Another fact that jars somewhat is that Mozart displayed scatological humour (obsession with vulgarity) in his letters and multiple recreational compositions. This material has long been a puzzle for Mozart scholarship. Some scholars try to understand it in terms of its role in Mozart's family, his society and his times; others attempt to understand it as a result of an 'impressive list' of psychiatric conditions from which Mozart is claimed to have suffered. But we do know that Mozart wore a wig and had a love of fine and fashionable clothes that might have disguised a not very prepossessing countenance.

I am not surprised that the Speaker of the House of Commons is expressing considerable annoyance that important parts of the Budget are being leaked to the press in advance of the Budget speech on Wednesday. There is an important convention that important policy announcements should be made first to the MPs in Parliament and not briefed beforehand. This briefing may well be a breach of the Ministerial Code in any case. When Keir Starmer was in Opposition, he rightly condemned the Tory party for briefing important policy announcements to the press and it now appears that he and his government are doing exactly the same thing. The rules are clear and I cannot see what advantage it is to the government to make these announcements early and, of course, it just reinforces in the public mind that 'they are all the same' The Labour party spokesmen have got themselves into a terrible tangle by constantly saying that their policy of not raising the three principal taxes of income tax, NI and VAT should not adversely affect 'working people' but the very small employer who might be subject to increases in NI contributions is 'de facto' classified as not a working person and so the arguments have persisted for days and days.