Just a stickful of sugar ...

Thanks to everyone who provided reassurance and advice yesterday about my little angina problem: all much appreciated.

Today turned into another one of my lazy ones. Well, it did after making sure I took my angina tablet and checking the weather (no sign of snow: almost feeling cheated about that) and taking a quick trip to the local shop for grocery essentials.

The grand, grand project continued of rationalising my iTunes library, transferring stuff from my original external drive to the new one, and weeding out stuff I know I'l never listen to again. The combined library is now up to some 9500 tracks and takes up over 200 GB. There's still a good way to go with the project (I'm concentrating on Classical to begin with, and will decide later what to do about all the jazz that's waiting around), with another 40 GB still out there on the original external and a large collection of jazz MP3s on CD which I desperately need to go through (I'm a bit concerned about the quality of these, which I put together back at the very beginning of my digital downloading days and are probably low-bitrate MP3s which I wouldn't be terribly happy with these days).

The day ended with a late-night wallow in BBC4 culture: a repeat of a fascinating programme about the great pianist Alfred Brendel, originally broadcast for his 70th birthday and aired again because he's recently retired from the concert platform. Poor Alfred would never be signed up by the major record labels these days, when being young and beautiful is almost more important than how good a musician you might be. Alfred always tended to look dour and just a bit miserable in the photographs which graced his CD covers, and we often wondered in the Music Group if he ever actually smiled. This programme gave the lie to that. It showed his relaxed side, his wicked sense of humour, and his other interests (most recently poetry). I was already aware of his reputation as a much-respected musical essayist. This programme has led me to search out his writings at Amazon, and I'm now determined to track down Alfred Brendel on Music, his collected essays. (The most-often referred to of these is one which he calls 'Must Classical Music be entirely serious?', and I especially look forward to reading that.)

Anyway, enough of all that (I never intended this to turn out so long, honestly) ... Today's blip is nothing special. Just a stuck-inside-and-still-have-a-blip-to-do blip. Its a lollipop which one of the up-market furniture stores at Beacon South Quarter was offering to customers (or, in our case, browsers).