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Mr. Bsag and I planned to go to London for the day yesterday. He had some prints in the Annual Open Exhibition at the Society of Graphic Fine Art, and was awarded a Highly Commended for one of them (yay!). He had to go and take down his work at the end of the show, so it was my last chance to see his work and the other exhibits in situ. Our plan was to get a cheap train to London on the Chiltern line, have a leisurely wander around the exhibition, get a few printing supplies from Intaglio, perhaps have a nice walk by the Thames, and top it off by having a cosy pint somewhere before coming home. It didn’t quite go according to plan.

Impediment 1: We thought we’d be able to get a cheap walk-up fare which would allow us to leave any time on a Saturday as we’ve done before, but Chiltern have changed their rules, so we had to book a ticket on line. Chiltern’s own booking page and thetrainline.co.uk showed completely different timetables. According to Chiltern, there were no cheap fares available, but thetrainline showed a few, leaving fairly late in the morning. Since we didn’t have much choice, we went for the later, cheaper train.

Impediment 2: We had to pick the tickets up from the station, but we’d had problems before with the dreaded self-service ticket machines which you’re supposed to use. However, it’s a little-known fact that even though the instructions say you can only pick up your tickets at one of a handful of stations with self-service machines, you can actually ask almost any ticket office to print the tickets for you if you give them the booking reference. So we’d timed our walk the local station to leave enough time to pick the tickets up there, get a train into the city, then walk to Moor Street Station in time to catch our train. Unfortunately, when we got to the local station, the ticket office was inexplicably closed. With a train approaching, we realised that we’d have to get the first train to leave enough time to pick up our tickets at Moor Street. The ticket machine had a long queue of similarly irritated passengers, of course, so we had to get a permit to travel and leap on the train.

Impediment 3: If you pick up your ticket to London from the local station, they include the cost of the local train journey in the price, so you don’t have to pay separately. But in our hurry to get the tickets booked, I’d forgotten to set the starting station as our local one. So when we came to join another long queue to exchange our permits to travel for tickets so we would be allowed to leave New Street Station, the dour railway official stubbornly pointed to the fact that our booking receipt said that the departure station was Moor Street, and we had to pay for two single tickets to New Street.

Impediment 4: With all this queuing and faffing about, we were getting rather close to the departure of our train. My heart sank as we ran into Moor Street Station and I saw the length of the queues at the only open ticket counter. I waited in line there for a minute or so, then decided to cut my losses and brave the self-service machines which had a shorter queue. When I got to the front, I inserted my debit card and entered the handy 20 digit booking reference (or so it seemed) on the touchscreen, whereupon the display announced smugly that it couldn’t read my card. I tried again, hoping that sliding the card in and out of the slot slowly might allow the idiot, mouth-breathing software time to read all the ones and zeros on the magnetic strip. It didn’t. I joined the queue for the other machine, fidgeting impatiently and looking at my watch. When I got to the front, I went through the whole procedure again, but this time, my card was recognised. Several geological eras later, our tickets had all been dispensed into the hopper, and I snatched them up and pelted across the concourse following Mr. B. We hared up the stairs, along the bridge and down the stairs, to see our train pulling out.

Impediment 5: The next train was 20 minutes later, but it was a stopping train and so would arrive 40 minutes or so after the one we’d planned to get, eating further into our already compressed day. Worse still, it was stopping at Wembley Stadium, where thousands of football fans were going to watch England play Kazakhstan. A large proportion of those fans seemed to be travelling from Moor Street. By some miracle, we both got a seat, and even though the fans collectively drank several lakes of Carling Black label, they were good-natured and no fights broke out. Still, we got slightly drunk on the lager fumes.

Impediment 6: London Marylebone Street! We got on the Bakerloo line southbound, and settled back thinking that the worst was over. At Oxford Circus, the train started making the ominous, escaping air sounds of a busted hydraulic system. Harried engineers bustled through the carriages with the hope that they might be able to plug something back in or slap some gaffer tape on something, but it was clear that the train was going nowhere, which meant that the Bakerloo line was going to be blocked. We jumped off the train, hurriedly consulted a tube map and decided to try our luck on the Victoria line to Stockwell, then change to the Northern line to get to Borough. It was a much longer journey, and there was a lot of running through corridors and up escalators, but we got there.

By this time, we had just 20 minutes or so to see the exhibition before the artists started taking down. We divided our efforts, and Mr. Bsag went to Intaglio to get his supplies, while I swept around the Menier Gallery. It was an excellent exhibition, so I was glad to have seen it, but it was a pretty lightning visit. Mr. Bsag joined me and we got busy with the bubblewrap and tape to pack up his prints to take home. It was a lovely evening, and it would have been really nice to wander along the river for a bit, but now we were convinced that we wanted to get a train before the final whistle at Wembley. We had a quick but very pleasant drink at a pub, then walked back to Borough tube station.

Impediment 7: As we got to the station, we could see that the shutters were closed. The lifts had stopped working, so they’d closed the station. We’d have to trek to London Bridge to get on the Northern Line. We stared. Mr. Bsag said, “You’ve got to be kidding”, though he added a few more words of a four-letter nature. Off we ran again, this time encumbered by three large, framed prints.

In the end we made it back to Marylebone in time for our train, and the rest of the journey went smoothly, but we ended up only having about two hours in London, and countless hours travelling.

On those occasions when my best laid plans gang aglae, my mood tends to go in one of two directions: I either get incredibly irritated and snappy or I see the whole situation as increasingly hilarious. I went in the latter direction this time, so in a rather perverse way, I quite enjoyed it. It was almost like finding yourself in a very bad film, subject to the whims of a poor writer who doesn’t know how to construct a believable plot. After each impediment I started to look forward to what this idiot would try to pass off as a plot twist next. “Broken-down tube train? Come on, at least throw some zombies in, then it would be funny, and you could go for the RomZomCom angle, even though it’s already been done by Edgar Wright.”

Mr. Bsag, it has to be said, was not of the same frame of mind, and regarded my amused, Buddha-like detachment with frank amazement, convinced that I’d finally gone off my rocker. My outlook might have had something to do with the fact that if I hadn’t gone to London, I would have been finishing off submitting a grant — something that I did this morning instead. It’s all relative, you see: it might have been a catalogue of mishaps, but it wasn’t wrestling with font sizes and page limits, and it at least gave me a good story to tell.

I’m back in the UK after three weeks in Brazil. It was a good trip: the students worked hard and enjoyed themselves, we saw a lot of interesting animals, and my colleague and I made good progress on a grant application. However, it’s a long time to be away from Mr. Bsag, and it’s very nice to be home. When I got back from the airport yesterday and sat down on the sofa with him, cup of tea in hand, I was more content and happy than I’ve been for some time.

One of the real killers with the trip is the travel. Brazil is a fantastic country, but it’s also very, very big. Our return journey took 36 hours in total, involving a 5 hour minibus journey and 4 separate flights. We also had a fair bit of hassle with the flights this time, though thankfully we didn’t miss any of them. I don’t want to get on another plane for a few months, I think!

In my absence, Mr. Bsag has been a whirlwind of productive activity. As well as making a lot of prints, he had arranged for an ugly conifer to be taken down in our garden, got the loft insulated, and even re-painted the hall, stairwell, landing, and the kitchen. It makes me think that I’m slowing him down, but I don’t think either of us could keep up the pace we set when we’re apart and trying to distract ourselves with activity.

One of the dubious pleasures of being an academic is the annual graduation ceremony. On the one hand, it’s lovely to see the students you’ve taught graduating and celebrating their success. On the other, you have to sit through an awful lot of names being called out and hands being shaken. You also have to wear an academic gown and mortar board, which is downright weird when your usual attire consists of jeans and t-shirts. All Universities have different colours for their gowns, and the Oxford PhD gown is spectacularly lairy. It’s bright scarlet and electric blue, so you march solemnly into the hall looking exactly like a female eclectus parrot. In a hat.

The Birmingham ceremonies are quite nicely done, and we even get a brass fanfare as we process into and out of the Great Hall. I don’t know if it’s a long-standing tradition, but the music going in to the Hall is usually fairly solemn and a bit pompous. The music for processing out of the Hall, on the other hand, is often hilariously (and deliberately) inappropriate¹. One year we got the theme from the Dambusters, and this year — hilariously — it was the theme from Thunderbirds. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but it was all I could do not to imitate a Gerry Anderson puppet walk, or pretend to that I was flying Thunderbird 2. Imagine that: a female eclectus parrot, in a hat, flying Thunderbird 2. You can’t say that the Univseristy of Birmingham graduation ceremonies aren’t memorable.

¹ One thing that I love about Brummies and the ethos of the city of Birmingham as a whole is that they refuse to take themselves too seriously. There’s a constant level of dry wit and self-mockery that I like a lot. ↑

I attended the Baggs Memorial Lecture on Happiness at the University of Birmingham on Monday, which this year was given by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. As memorial lectures go, the ‘Happiness Lecture’ is a quirky one. Thomas Baggs was born in Birmingham in 1889, and subsequently got a couple of degrees at the University. When he died, he left a bequest providing for an annual public lecture on happiness, specifically “Happiness — what it is and how it may be achieved by individuals as well as nations.” You could argue that a large sum of money would be better directed towards more directly practical purposes, but I love the fact that he left money for an academic lecture on happiness.

Andrew Motion started by saying that — while he was honoured to be asked to deliver the lecture — he did rather wonder whether someone on the committee had put his name forward for a dare. Poets are generally not renowned for their happiness, and he freely admitted that his own poems tended towards slight gloominess. Anyway, he did a great job, surveying the opinions of writers and philosophers throughout history about what makes people happy. He also — as you might expect given his profession — read a few poems illustrating his points. There were two in particular that I had never heard before and found completely ravishing. I love it when you hear or read a poem, and find some imagery that is totally unexpected and yet precisely captures the way you feel about something. I loved the following lines from ‘Postscript’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘Coming’ by Philip Larkin:

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans

— Postscript by Seamus Heaney

A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

— Coming by Phillip Larkin

Motion’s own opinion was that you find happiness through the fulfilment of other things like creativity. Thinking about it on the way home, I also think that you can’t find happiness directly. Like the pursuit of love, the pursuit of happiness is doomed to failure. Instead, (and like love) it tends to turn up when you are least expecting it, but you have to be open to its possibility and recognise it when it arrives.

I went to the zoo last week¹, and found that watching the humans watching the animals was almost as interesting (and upsetting) as watching the animals themselves. They have a snow leopard, and as I approached the enclosure, I noticed a young man in his late teens, with an emo-ish air about him. He was standing in front of the glass viewing window, palm pressed to the glass, intently watching the snow leopard following its endless track around the cage. He was looking at the cat with such deep sympathy and sorrow that my heart went out to them both. He saw me, gave me a brief, hunted look and went back to his vigil.

Passing the enclosure later in the day, I saw the same chap. He was now sitting on the ground, leaning against the cage — still looking in. In the week since going to the zoo, I’ve thought about Snow Leopard Man a few times, and hoped that he manages to work through his sadness somehow.

¹ For work purposes, actually, which made a nice change of pace and scenery. ↑

My parents live in a very suburban part of Surrey¹, but they have always attracted a lot of wildlife to their garden. They have plenty of bird feeders and get a wide variety of avian visitors, and they’ve seen foxes regularly for a number of years. Recently, however, they’ve been getting species that you don’t usually associate with suburban gardens, like roe deer. The foxes have also been getting tamer (probably partly because my parents and some of their neighbours put out food for them), and they spend a lot of time relaxing in the garden during daylight hours, rather than visiting at night just to grab some food.

I visited at the weekend, and saw their latest wild/tame fox. It comes right down to the bottom of the garden, near the house, and lounges around on the lawn. You can go outside and stand a few metres away from it, and it just carries on with what it is doing. I went out and took some photographs here and here, and it more or less ignored me. I love watching wild animals, and it’s a real privilege when a wild animal carries on with its life while you watch from close quarters. It came over to collect some of the dog food, then went and buried a few pieces in a nearby flower bed. I don’t think it would be there when it went back for it later, because there were a couple of magpies nearby, carefully noting where the food was stored. Apparently, the magpies often try to steal its food, but it cleverly waits calmly until my Dad comes outside and scares the magpies off, then goes back to feeding. It’s certainly not malnourished and has the sleek, well-fed look of a pampered, Stockbroker Belt fox.

¹ Well, most of Surrey is very suburban, to be fair. ↑

As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of ‘bsag’ and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone’s face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We’ve dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don’t seem able to handle the fact that — while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems — I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I’d dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir’s ‘Invisible Woman’ character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I’d just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I’d thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they’d actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

Yesterday, Mr. Bsag lost his wedding ring. He was working on the allotment and took the ring off because it was rubbing his finger when he was using the spade. Like the big idiot he is sometimes, he put the ring in the top pocket of his overalls which a) doesn’t fasten closed, and b) has a hole in the bottom, though to be fair, he didn’t know about b) until it was too late. The inevitable happened, and the ring must have dropped out of his pocket while he was spreading the huge load of horse manure we had delivered on to the beds. We went up to look for it, but it could be under several trailer loads of muck by now, so it was a fairly hopeless search.

I was surprised how upset I was by the loss of his ring. It’s only a piece of metal after all, and the fact that he doesn’t now have it in his possession or on his finger makes no difference to our relationship. But it still upset me. Our rings weren’t just picked off the trays of a jewellery shop, but were made to our own design by a lovely craftsman jeweller based in Birmingham. They weren’t expensive, but they were special and unique to us. At our wedding, I carried my grandmother’s wedding ring as my ‘something old’, and it had worn very thin over the years of her marriage. I wanted our rings to wear thin too, but now only mine will do so, and that makes me sad.

In folk tales and ballads, when this kind of thing happens, the years pass and the man catches a huge fish at sea, which he gets his servants to cook at a great feast. The woman then cuts open the belly of the fish, only to find the lost ring shining inside. Our allotment is a bit far from the sea for that, but my faith in the narrative imperative is such that I’m fairly confident that — some years from now — we’ll cut open a particularly prize specimen of a potato, which we have grown on our allotment, only to find the lost ring embedded in the flesh.

That, or we’ll have to make friends with someone who has a metal detector, but it doesn’t have quite the same ballady feel about it.

Mr. Bsag and I spent the weekend with my parents and my brother to celebrate my parents’ Ruby Wedding Anniversary on Sunday (40 years, for those not fluent in the gemstone to years-married conversion). It was a quiet family do, but great fun, despite the weather doing its best to scupper carefully laid plans with bitter winds and snow.

My brother and I hatched a plot to make them a photo book (using iPhoto) of photographs from their wedding day and a selection of other shots from the 40 years since. Unfortunately, we had to let Dad in on the secret because he is the keeper of the family slide collection, and had to do an enormous amount of scanning and sorting before we put it together. But we made sure that the final selection and layout was a surprise.

It was a roaring success, and both my parents thought it was a lovely idea. Since some of the wedding photos were on slides, they hadn’t seen them for years, so it was wonderful to look at them again, and I’m really impressed with the quality of the book. All the images came out really well, and it looks very classy.

I might even order a copy for myself, but I’m definitely going to get enlargements of a wonderful shot from their wedding. It’s a colour shot of Mum and Dad in the back of the wedding car, looking gloriously happy and covered in confetti. I suspect that they were also pretty glad to be out of the cold, because their wedding day was also bitterly cold and windy, just like this Sunday.

I’m one of those people who really enjoys (in a slightly masochistic way) watching Grand Designs. There’s no way that Mr. Bsag and I will ever have the money to buy a plot of land and build a house, but we enjoy watching other people go through the process. One benefit of house-building by proxy is that — while you don’t end up with a gorgeous designer home to live in — you don’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and go grey worrying about your house slipping down a hillside overnight and ending up in a pile of rubble by the side of the road.

We have, however, noticed something interesting about the programme which adds an interesting dimension to watching it. If you watch carefully, you’ll sometimes notice that some of the building firms or contractors involved in the build have their company logos pixellated out. In a surprising number of cases the be-pixellated ones end up being fired from the job, doing something disastrous, or getting into contractual or legal wrangles with the people commissioning the house build. It isn’t always the case, presumably because the production company hasn’t got permission to feature the logo, or something like that. But it does add a frisson of anticipation to the show when you see a blurred out logo: “That newly installed wall is going to collapse/leak/explode!”. Not that I indulge in schadenfreude, you understand…

Perhaps everyone involved should wear a pre-pixellated t-shirt to spoil our fun.

Well, that wasn’t the quiet, restful weekend we’d planned.

Mr. Bsag has been having terrible trouble with his teeth. Several teeth on one side hurt like hell, and were very sensitive to heat and cold. He made an emergency appointment with the dentist he was registered with in our old house, and — diagnosing a build-up of plaque — removed the plaque and said all would be well. But it continued to hurt badly, and on Friday, the whole of the lower half of his face had swollen up and he was having difficulty swallowing. In the meantime, I had managed to register him at our local dentist’s (after registering with them myself earlier in the week), and we got another emergency appointment for him. It’s not quite clear what the problem is, but it seems as if — in scraping the plaque away — the previous dentist might have introduced an infection into his gums. So he’s on antibiotics, but has been feeling pretty bad all weekend. Mr. Bsag likes his food, and a husband unable to eat solids is not a happy husband.

He’s feeling a bit better now, though still swollen, but it has been a weekend of sleepless nights and worry (for us both), and pain (for him).

To cap it all, someone bashed into my parked car in a supermarket car park, so I also spent some of the weekend on a wild goose chase to try and find a touch-up pen in the right colour, and trying to polish the scratches out. The damage is cosmetic, but it was a hassle I could have done without this weekend. Can I have another weekend instead of Monday morning, please?

We watched the film After Life at the weekend, and I really loved it. The film’s premise is that people who have recently died arrive at a slightly derelict institution, where they must — with the help of an advisor — decide on the one memory that they will take with them to the afterlife. Everything else will be forgotten, and they will live in that memory for ever. At the end of a week, the chosen memory is carefully recreated on video by technicians, and they go off to the afterlife to live in that moment.

Rather than trying to suggest that this is the way things actually are when you die, I felt that the director intended it to stimulate viewers to think about which memory they would take with them, if they were in the same situation. By coincidence, I’m re-reading ‘The Amber Spyglass’ at the moment (the final part of Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy), and there is a similar idea in that, posed in a different way. So this has been on my mind recently, and I went to bed after the film thinking about memories.

Think about it yourself — picking just one special memory is incredibly difficult. I’ve obviously got a number which are too personal for public broadcast on this blog (ahem), but I thought I’d share a few of the more — how shall I put it? — U Certificate ones with you.

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It’s funny how completing the little jobs that you’ve been putting off for ages, but aren’t really that difficult, can really make your day. If they involve something you didn’t know you could do until you tried, it adds about 100 bonus points.

Two things in our house have needed fixing since we moved in over a year ago. The first was the kitchen light. It was one of those ‘curved arm holding spotlights’ things, with tungsten spotlights, rather than halogen ones. Quite apart from being thoroughly blessed by the Ugly Fairy, two of the light fittings had a fault, and would sulkily blow bulbs as soon as you replaced them. Consequently, our kitchen had several very gloomy spots.

It’s one of those things that you look at many times a day and subconsciously think “I must get around to fixing that”, before you go on your way with a slight but gnawing feeling of things being unfinished. This week, we finally got around to going to a shop and buying a new light. Ridiculously, that was what was holding the whole thing back: once we’d got our shiny new halogen light, we were raring to put it up. We’d never attempted to replace a ceiling light fitting before, but it turned out to be very easy, once we’d worked out which of the many unlabelled fuses in the fuse box controlled the lighting ring. A few minutes work, some tutting at the messy nest of wiring stuffed into the ceiling space (just like real electricians!), and some work with a screwdriver, and it was done. When we replaced the fuse and switched on the light to find our kitchen bathed in lovely, clean, bright light, it felt like a genuine achievement, and a disproportionately large load lifted from our shoulders.

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Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m a day late, but what’s a day between friends?

I’ve taken a couple of extra leave days, so I’m not back at work until next Monday, and I’m enjoying just pottering around, and trying to shake off a weird bug I seem to have picked up. I had one of those days today where you start off with the intention of fixing one small thing, and end up putting a whole host of things right by accident.

It started with my long-disconnected SliMP3 player. When we moved into our new house, I didn’t get around to connecting up the SliMP3 player, for a number of very dull reasons, but partly because I didn’t have a long enough Ethernet cable. (I know: it’s a classic GTD situation of not having the right next action written down…) It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to finding a cable and fixing the other impediments and hooking that sucker up. They are beautifully simple devices, so the configuration was fairly straight-forward, except that I’d forgotten that in the interval between last using it and now, I’d converted most of my iTunes library to AAC format from MP3. My player can’t transcode AAC on the hardware (I believe some of the new players can do it), but the server software can convert AAC on the fly to MP3 and play that. Except that I needed LAME installed, so all I got was a ‘Can’t play file’ message. After a quick install of LAME all was well. Except that the horrible distortion I’ve noticed intermittently in my audio system downstairs was really ruining my enjoyment of listening to the SliMP3.

So I decided to see if I could track down the problem. We have a very noisy mains electrical system in our house, and the boiler controller is a particularly bad source of noise. I’d assumed when I heard the distortion before that it was the boiler switch, but today I was listening with the heating system off, and it was still distorted. I checked cable connections, tightened speaker terminals and swapped out power strips, all to no avail. Just when I was beginning to despair of being able to find the source of the problem, I noticed that when I listened with my ear to each speaker in turn, the left was producing all of the distortion. Checking the speaker cable to that speaker carefully, I found that the insulation had cracked, exposing the wire. Aha! Fifteen minutes of pottering in the garage looking for my wire strippers, and some cutting back of the cable, and the distortion had gone. Now I could sit back and listen to my SliMP3 player.

But now I noticed that there were huge numbers of mislabelled files cluttering up the artist listing, making it hard to chose the artists I wanted to listen to. I then felt compelled to go into iTunes and clear up the database, getting rid of some temporary files, and naming everything properly with the correct metadata.

By the time I came downstairs to finally listen to my distortion-free, nicely organised music, it was time for tea. Seriously, where did the day go?

We were on our own for Christmas and Boxing Day this year, so we had a couple of quiet days. After a hectic time at the tail end of this year, it was great to just stop and do very little. On Christmas Day itself, we cooked a crackingly good dinner (salmon en croute, in case you were wondering, with stir-fried carrots and sprouts and roast potatoes and parsnips), opened some presents and watched Doctor Who.

While we were eating dinner, and for a while afterwards, we listened to a World Routes which Mr. Bsag had recorded from Radio 3 earlier in the month, in which the presenter Lucy Duran travels to Georgia to listen to the traditional polyphonic choral music. I’ve been a fan of Georgian music for a long time, but the live recordings (if you’ll forgive the tautology) in the programme were incredibly good. While we were eating, we heard a couple of hymns by the St. Panteleimon Chanters (their name gloriously close to Lyra’s daemon, you notice) recorded at a funeral. That might sound an oddly depressing soundtrack to Christmas, but it was beautiful, ethereal, peaceful music, and far from depressing. In fact, it almost made me want to convert to Orthodox Christianity and move to Georgia, just to have the St. Panteleimon Chanters sing at my funeral. The only slight flaw in that cunning plan is, of course, that I wouldn’t get to hear the music at my own funeral.

They moved on to the traditional ‘table songs’ of the Tusheti region, which is my favourite Georgian style. This included some live recordings of the Tsinandali choir which blew me away. While I listened to their music with a huge lump in my throat, I tried to think what their music reminded me of. It was on the edge of my mind, but when it popped to the forefront, I was rather surprised: their music is like a wolf pack howling. That sounds like an insult, but actually I mean it as the highest praise. Like a wolf howl, there are shifting pitches, voices supporting and intertwining with one another. And like a wolf howl, it speaks to you of joy, longing, sorrow, exultation, fear, power and a wildness that immediately raises the hairs on your neck, and fills the night with electricity. It was a very special experience to hear the recording, so I can’t imagine how powerful it must have been like to be there and hear it live.

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