Beauty in decay

I keep on saying it: one of the main reasons for committing myself to host the Music Group once a month is that it forces me to clean and tidy the house. Things had got rather badly out of hand over the past week or so, so I was up at the proverbial crack of dawn to dust and hoover and tidy and furniture-arrange and biscuit-buy. Strangely enough, I enjoyed it all enormously, and I was ready and set and calm and collected well in advance of the first arrival. In the process I managed to dash off this quick blip of the dying remnants of my birthday bouquet.

I was 'doing a double' today (both hosting and filling the final 30 minutes with the music presentation for the day. I'd been thinking about this for some time, and had a dozen or so alternative choices available. I made the final decision the previous night, opting for something I'd thought of doing for quite some time -- a selection of pieces in which the composer either quoted the Gregorian chant hymn Dies Irae or based the whole composition on it. It worked really well, and went down a treat with the group. Three of us went to the local pub afterwards and got stuck into one of those really great chat sessions which develop a life of their own and move outside time. We discussed the referendum result, possibilities for next year's musical destination (New York figured strongly, since those of us who refused to go there during Bush's White House tenure will be free to cross the Atlantic with a clear conscience), arrangements for our trip to Gozo in October, musical likes and dislikes ... etc etc ... My Blip life cropped up in conversation too, I mentioned I only had one shot in the can for the day as yet, one of the guys handed over his camera and offered to send on the picture file as the blip of the day -- but I'm still waiting, so the original just-in-case shot will have to do.

I was much later getting back home than originally intended, and consequently later knuckling down to work than I should have been.