No title (Glasgow)

To Glasgow, for Radio 3's live broadcast of Bruckner's Second Symphony with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

After an exhausting two hours dozing and reading my book on the train, I thought it best to repair to the Horseshoe Bar, for health and safety reasons. An old fellow came and sat next to me and started talking about how he only ever heats one room of his house. He gave me his newspaper. Inside there was a coupon for a free bet, so I placed it on Sol Whit in the 3.20 at Cheltenham because it sounds like Sol LeWitt. She (he? I don't know what sex horses are) came in at 17/2 and so I won £8.50.

Sol LeWitt, [no title]
from Straight Lines in Four Directions and All their Possible Combinations
(Set of 15+1), 1973

Back in the pub, a middleaged couple, affectionate and close and touchy. She said "I don't mind..." She paused. "Isolating people I don't need."

My host and his young Nicaraguan wife suggested meeting up in "Boteca de Brasil" in Trongate, which is about as Brazilian as my right buttock. Big flashing screens showed either football, or a looped film of young brown women in bikinis and men with curly hair dancing on beaches and fast close-ups of glittering cocktail glasses. Blaring music (music you don't like "blares"). The "profiteroles" were lumps of dough with squirty cream and melted dark chocolate slathered over them.

All of a sudden, there was a loud banging and clattering. I looked round and a lunatic had his anger-contorted face an inch away from mine. Two young members of staff girlhandled him out and apologised. "Probably Welsh," I said, surprised at my own calm. Such are the benefits of having a couple of extra pints in the afternoon when you've won on the horses.

At the City Halls, we didn't have much time to survey the audience as Radio 3, understandably, wanted us all quiet and drilled by 7.20. But there was a thirtysomething girl in green high heels and a lovely tight, below-the-knee skirt in the same colour--not hippy-feuillemort, but a glistering, reflective green. After that, her white shirt was a little bit of a let-down.

In the cheapest seats, front row, extreme stage left, my thigh was slowly resembling that of Oetzi, as it was next to an air vent. For the second half (the Bruckner), we managed to move a bit further back to avoid being cryogenically preserved in Glasgow City Halls.

Defrosted, we settled down for Bruckner 2. Thomas Dausgaard is perhaps the most irritating of a typically irritating occupational group. Keen to wrest the audience's attention from the music onto how intensely he is feeling it, he swaggers his baton towards the leader, inches away from her face. At one point he got so close to the violinist on the opposite side, with his silly dancing, that his baton touched the latter's music stand.

It was an enjoyable performance, even though I like my Bruckner slower than Dausgaard took it. Afterwards, there was to be a short "coda" of some piano pieces by Chopin. I certainly wanted to stay for it. Tim and his wife huddled together in one of those couply conflabs which suggest disharmony; she put her coat on in a challenging way. Fortunately, Tim resisted.

A few minutes later, safe that she'd left, he said "You know what women are like--always going on about something or the other. It's almost a relief when she goes off and does her own thing." She would have been a burden at the Blackfriars afterwards, where me and Tim drank Cromarty Bitter and talked about our respective experiences of Ukraine. We went through the programme for the forthcoming year. Could your wife not find something else to do if we go to Mahler 5?, I didn't say.