Lockdown Diary - Sunday 16th August 2020

Lie in until about 8, before slowly getting up, exercising and getting dressed to face another day in fun land.  More strange dreams and haunting accusatory nightmares. 

Planning a quiet day: got some chores to do, also need to finish the papers from yesterday and today, read more of 'Ulysses' and 'Kindred' as well as listen to some music.

Got a call early afternoon from my mother-in-law, who was a bit upset about her conversation with son #3 yesterday, in part because she feels that son #1 and 3 haven't properly thanked her for the presents she's sent them.  Son #3 thought he had thanked her, but her expectation compared to what he did/said don't quite tally. It's annoying because I've been reminding him for the past two weeks to call her as I knew this was the inevitable outcome.  There's a whole saga that I could go into here, but I've decided not to rake over old coals: it achieves nothing.

I found an interesting post on FB where someone had taken a piece of music drawn on someone's bottom within a frame of one of my favourite paintings, Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'.  If you're not familiar with it, here it is:

In the right panel of the triptych there is an image of someone with music written on their bottom.  Someone transcribed this music and recorded it on YouTube, with a new intro and outro - worth a listen if you have a spare moment (search YT for 'Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music'), though this isn't where I'm leading. What this lead me on to is something called 'The Devil's Tritone' - it goes by a variety of other names: 'Diabolus in musica (devil in music), the devil’s interval, the tritone, the triad and the flatted fifth'.  It's a series of notes / a chord which sounds unsettling or disturbing. Interestingly it's been used in rock music by Black Sabbath in particular (of course!), but also by Jimi Hendrix in the opening chords of 'Purple Haze'.  It's also been used in classical music - if you want to read more you could do worse than look here. An interesting diversion and worthy of further musical investigation.

Late afternoon now: I've finished reading the papers and read more of 'Ulysses', which is a result - a few things to do then once the final carer call of the day is over I will listen to some music - got a lot to catch up on.

Managed to listen to the whole of Soccer Mommy's recent album and a few tracks from Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell before it was time to get dinner under way.

Film night and son #3's choice - he wanted to go with 'The Big Lebowski' but one of his brothers persuaded him not to, so he's chosen the recently restored and released TV adaptation of 'The Woman In Black' from way back in 1989.   

Started dinner a bit late, so I think I missed a bit of the film, but it was a very impressive restoration - widescreen and very good image quality - you certainly wouldn't know it was made that long ago. Excellent acting with a few actors who are no longer with us and a few who look impossibly young.  It's also a great film and suitably scary - one of my sons actually screamed at a certain rather scary point. 

I don't often choose music that I've just listened to, but the new Soccer Mommy album has so many good songs on it - there isn't really a bad track - that I just had to.  The album is called 'Color Theory' (yep, she is American) and from it I've chosen 'Crawling In My Skin'

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