From me to you
Fleck
Thu 2 May 2013 13:04
|
Thursday, 2nd May
Position 11:14.1S 10:40.3W
A quiet 24 hours, incident wise. Two big flying
fish, otherwise no visitors. A lovely breeze of about 17kts. We can surf
down the waves under full sail, but it is not yet so rough as to be a pain.
Bright sunshine today, after several quite cloudy days.
The gloomy atmosphere in Paris has pervaded the
ship once again. The terror there is in full swing, the royalists are all
decapitated, and now the republicans are starting on themselves. My
e-reader tells me that there is only 18% of the book to go, but I'm not so sure
that there are enough characters left alive at this stage for there to be anyone
at all still standing by the end.
I have managed a bit of keyboard practice, but it
is difficult to balance everything, and my only sheet music is a Beatles
compilation, with the base chords drawn as fingering diagrams in a seperate
box at the top of each sheet. I can play some of the tunes now, but my
brain/finger co-ordination just refuses to go quite as fast as the composers
intended. It is quite schizophrenic: my fingers hover over the base notes,
trying to form themselves into the correct shape for the chord required, whilst
another part of my brain looks on in mounting anguish as the time delay
destroys the continuity of the piece. To go fast enough I must cut out the
mental step which takes me away from the written music, up to the chord diagram,
and back to the music. This means having to learn the hand/finger position for
each annotated chord eg. Bm, G7, or Dm7! I just do not have the brain
for this sort of task: takes me back to French 'O'level: those of us who
struggle with languages struggle with music too. At the ripe age of nearly 67 I
don't think that there is much to be done about this, just slow down the tempo,
and avoid the anguuish!
I'm best at 'Help', but having put 'Mayday' in the
subject box yesterday, I thought that I should offer up my second best
title.
300 miles to Ascension, but less wind tomorrow, so
three days at sea yet.
|